Thanks to mobile devices like the iPhone and recent efforts by numerous hardware manufacturers like HP, touch and multi-touch enabled devices are slowly becoming more ubiquitous. While Apple users have the mythical iTablet to look forward to, Windows users didn’t really have a similar project to latch on to, except maybe for Microsoft’s large and costly Surface table. Now, however, BumpTop has released the latest version of its innovative 3D desktop environment with support for multi-touch gestures.
New Multi-Touch Gestures
In Windows 7, Microsoft has now made multi-touch a built-in feature of the operating system and BumpTop makes full use of these capabilities. What makes the new BumpTop version especially interesting, however, is that the company came up with a number of pretty interesting gestures (PDF) that we haven’t seen in similar projects so far. You can, for example, push multiple objects on the screen around by pushing them with the side of your finger. Or you can crop an image by slicing across it with one finger while holding the image with another finger. You can now also easily drag and drop images and files from your BumpTop desktop to a USB key.
The following video shows the multi-touch gestures in action:
It’s important to note that the standard, free version of BumpTop doesn’t support multi-touch gestures – only the Pro version for $29 will. At the end of this post, however, you can find out how you can get a free Pro account.
Tablets Need Dedicated Interfaces
If the demise of Microsoft’s first tablet-PC initiative showed us one thing, it was that these kind of devices need a special user interface. BumpTop offers exactly this, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company is in talks with a number of hardware manufacturers to bundle BumpTop with their graphics cards, screens, and touch-enabled machines.
Of course, even if you don’t have a multi-touch capable screen, or if you have a touchscreen that can only recognize two fingers at a time, BumpTop will still work just fine, though you will obviously miss out on being able to use some gestures.
Next Version: Built-In Browser, Google Gadgets
Just like the last version of BumpTop, the new multi-touch version will still take you out of the BumpTop environment when you start an application. When we talked to Bumptop’s CEO Anand Agarawala yesterday, he pointed out that the team is aware of this and working on a solution to this problem. The next version, which should arrive within the next few months, will feature an integrated WebKit browser, for example, that will be integrated into the BumpTop experience. This new version will also offer support for Google Gadgets.
200 Free Pro Accounts
BumpTop graciously gave us 200 free Pro accounts to give to our readers. Just head over to this site and you will be able to try BumpTop in all its multi-touch glory (assuming you have access to a PC with a touchscreen).
