Quite seldom I see something on the net that is elegant, beautiful, and simple - so simple that it becomes obvious. Last time I had this feeling was with iPod's wheel.

There was lots of excitement about new Vista user interface features. The users who never used / saw OS-X, must love Vista. It is huge improvement over XP - much nicer, cleaner, very good typography, comes very close to Tiger. Linux users have their own great looking desktop XGL. From human-machine interaction point of view, neither Vista, nor XGL did really bring anything new - just caught up with Apple and added few eye candies on top. All this 3D-turning, spongy shaking windows, transparencies and rotating planes look indeed nice, but add very little to the functionality of Expose (besides, no one except Apple has two finger trackpad scrolls). So what is so cool about the BumpTop ? Everything.

User interface paradigm demonstrated in BumpTop prototype combines 3D graphics and physics in very new and creative ways. But see for yourself. The site offers hi-res videos in QT and WMV formats as downloads or torrents. The Youtube link to low res version is here. The lasso-n-cross idea and pile/unpile are so impressive. Enjoy !