First post!

June 30th, 2009 by Anand Agarawala

Hey everybody! Welcome (finally) to the BumpTop blog. We’ve been meaning to get a blog going for a while now, but as you can probably imagine, we’ve been pretty busy over the past few months. After a year in private beta, we publicly launched version 1.0 of BumpTop just under three months ago.

It was a pretty amazing feeling to finally be launching our little baby to the world. The press coverage was awesome — news of the launch was picked up by hundreds of news agencies and more than a thousand blogs. At launch, “bumptop” was a trending topic on Twitter. We made the front page of some of the most popular tech sites, like Gizmodo, Engadget, and Lifehacker. Even more incredible was getting press from some of the traditional media, including The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, NBC, and ABC. It even got covered in Entertainment Weekly! How crazy is that?

Overall, the reaction has been really positive. In the first week, BumpTop was in the Top 20 at Download.com, and our new YouTube video was the most-viewed video in April in the Science and Technology section, and #4 on all of YouTube. (The original BumpTop video is still one of the most-viewed YouTube Science & Tech videos of all time!)

So all in all, it was a pretty crazy couple of months at Bump HQ. Now that things are settled down a bit, we can concentrate on making BumpTop even better: fixing bugs, polishing the user experience, and adding new features. We’ll be using this blog to keep you in the loop on what we’re doing, so check back soon! Or better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed.

Until then, keep Bumpin’!

22 Comments ↓

  • Raj

    Ok. So after months you guys released a new update. All it did was fix so programing bugs. Thats all good and needed, but frankly i am starting to lose interest in this. I mean aside from looks and giving me more freedom on where to put my icons, bumptop isnt offering me anything. There aren’t many apps to make life more easier and organized and aren’t any new functions to keep users interested.

    This is a great software and has great potential but you gives have to give more to the user to keep them interested. An update after about two months that only fixes some under-the-surface programing bugs isn’t going to cut it.

  • The Bumps

    Thanks for your feedback and passion for our product! We’ve been very hard at work and have some great features coming up. Some we’ve already released and are slightly invisible, such as support for 10 more languages, letting lots more people around the world experience BumpTop.

    Other features that are coming up and really quite exciting. Such as:

    • The ability to move the camera around and zoom in, turning your desktop into a Zooming user interface that lets you focus in on specific work.
    • Multi-touch gestures and seamless compatability with Windows 7
    • Revamp of our Graphics architecture, enabling solid short and long term improvements
    • Better battery life on laptops
    • More good stuff coming soon =)

    And that’s what this blog is about. Opening the dialog and getting your input on what we’re doing next. So don’t hesitate to let us know what you want to see!

  • Angelo

    I agree with Raj. You guys have been awesome by adding some (if I remember, just 2..) new features to the closed beta, and it’s still not as awesome as the prototype version. There are many features lacking, and I know you guys keep saying that there still are flaws with it.. well then fix it! As you say you’ve had 3 months already, plus the closed beta where a lot of people were demanding the same: prototype features.

    It’s a really good piece of software but there needs to be more stuff in it.

    Oh, and I also think that the pro features aren’t really that special apart from the free version if you ask me.

  • Vikash Gupta

    I just ran into it accidently on TED. ITs amazing… feel sorry for apple the first time in my life… Is it possible to make something similar for Macs..

  • SUPPORT???

    Where do you go to get support on how to use this? The site that you have isn’t working and keeps redirecting me.

  • Anand Agarawala

    FEATURES We’ve been through an extensive closed beta period with BumpTop and added a ton of features. Over 25 different ones from the original prototype video. The video was just that, a prototype designed to help us explore ideas. Through the beta we kept around the best ones and added better ones. We’re always listening to features people want so let us know.

    SUPPORT Support options are listed here http://bumptop.com/support You can also write in the forums for help http://bumptop.com/forum and if you’re a Pro user you can email us at feedback@bumptop.com or call 1-888-505-BUMP. What page are you having problems with?

  • Gareth Coles

    Hello, team! I find this to be a pretty amazing piece of software myself. (Yes, yes, I know, I wasn’t part of the closed beta)

    Features? Well, there are a few small things that should be done, at least. First of all, making shortcuts need to work. They just disappear as soon as they fall in (This is creating a new one). Also, when you add something to the folder (say, User/Desktop) then it should automatically appear or there should be a refresh option to display it.

    And by the way, I read about web previews in the pro list. Seeing as I have pro, how do I do it?

  • The Bumps

    Hi Gareth,

    Thanks! Glad you’re enjoying BumpTop.

    Sorry about the problem with shortcuts. It’s a known problem (see here) and it’s being investigated right now. As a workaround, you can navigate to the item that you want to make a shortcut to, right click on it and select “Create Shortcut”. That should work, although I know it’s a pain to have to change your habits.

    When you add a new file or folder to the desktop, whether through Windows Explorer or some other means, it should appear almost instantly in BumpTop. We do watch the Desktop folder for changes. If that’s not working, let us know!

    The web previews are unfortunately disabled right now, as the service we were using (Alexa Site Thumbnails) has been shut down. We’re looking for an alternative though, and should hopefully have it available in an update before long.

    If you have any other issues, you may want to check out our support forum on Get Satisfaction.

  • Dan Healy

    Found the easiest workaround for folders not auto carried from windows desktop when bumptop is activated is to merely go back and hide it inside one of the folders that does make it through the transition. Have not found a way around not being able to change font size in post its.

  • Dan Healy

    and i liked the shelves, bring ‘em back. you could even match the shelves to the themes.

    speaking of themes, only half of them successfully loaded.

  • justin

    Dan,

    Thanks for letting us know about these issues. Could you email us directly, so we can get more information from you? Send an email inside BumpTop’s “Send Feedback” link in the tray icon, and mention these 3 issues (Missing folders from desktop, font size in sticky notes and theme loading problems) so we can reproduce and fix these problems.

    Our forums (http://bumptop.com/forum) are also a great place to post these types of problems so they can get fixed =).

  • Jim Garretson

    I’m interested to try BumpTop, but I don’t want to commit to it without trying it for awhile. Can you uninstall BumpTop?

  • Patrick Dubroy

    Hi Jim,

    No problem — you can try out BumpTop for as long as you like, and easily remove it via Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs.

  • Desmond Foo

    Hi,

    Been using bumptop after watching the demo on TED. Loving it.

    Would love it more if bumptop could act as a window explorer of sort where i could go to ‘My Pictures’ folder and have all my photos spew on bumptop. Just thinking…

    KEEP UP THE GREAT JOB U GUYS ARE DOING.

  • BumpTop CEO named a top young entrepreneur! – BumpTop Blog

    [...] few weeks ago, we launched this blog with a post by Anand Agarawala, the CEO and co-founder of BumpTop. In his post, Anand recapped some of the exciting things that [...]

  • misab haris

    I like to try using bump top and i downloaded it but when it finished installation and when i try o open it. It shows

    THe application failed to instilize (0xc0150002)

    i have tried downloading 3 times I am using windows xp

  • Patrick Dubroy

    Hi Misab,

    We had some problems with some peoples’ C runtime being out of date. The problem should be fixed in our latest installer, which you can get from http://bumptop.com/download.php. If that doesn’t solve your problem, please let us know.

  • Jared P Little

    Anand, Wow I just downloaded this and it is pretty cool. Thanks and nice work with this looking forward to learning it.

  • ASdas

    I like this tool, but i don’t like that pictures on walls cant be snapped. They hang there all the time and if I click even a little bit with mouse to zoom in, they start moving, sometimes even fall down. I want to “lock” them down, so it’s not possible to move them with mouse when click unless they are “unlocked”

  • Gregory Thrower

    I had this app loaded about a year ago, but I (sigh) ended up uninstalling it. It didn’t span across (at least dual) monitors, and RDP would cause it to crash when I remoted in to my PC from a user’s workstation. Have these been fixed?

  • Patrick Dubroy

    Hi Gregory,

    I believe the RDP problem has been fixed. It still doesn’t span across two monitors though. We’ve thought about that but we’re not sure what the right answer is, from a UI point of view.

  • rodrigo unda

    hello there! im a big fan of BT since it was only a concept. now i wonder if there is any way to drop a chrome window into the desktop, as we saw in the demos or in te screenshots. im useing a demo / trial version.

    any ideaa about?

    thanks!

Leave a Comment