While reading through my daily feeds, I came across something very interesting on DVICE’s blog. It’s called BumpTop and it’s the newest way to visualize your desktop. As you can see in the image below, it turns that flat desktop into a three-dimensional desktop with walls.

It’s really pretty cool. Although I couldn’t get it to work at all on Vista Business at home (I have an email in to support), I got it working smoothly here my office. I did have to update my video drivers, but it actually linked me right to the area to get started and I was still up and running with my new BumpTop pretty quickly. The default comes with Twitter, Facebook, and Email action icons (widgets?) on the right wall. The Twitter integration did not work for me. Despite all my attempts, it could not log me in. The Facebook integration worked better. It whined about an API key when it tried to authorize the app on my account, but it still let me drag a photo onto it to upload it to Facebook, which is nice. The Email integration worked nicely, too. I was able to drag an item onto it to create a new email with that as an attachment. You can also just double-click it to start a new blank email. On the left wall is a lonely to-do sticky note, which you can take quick notes on for later. On the back wall was a photo frame. I now have three on my back wall and they all rotate through the photos in slide show fashion.

In the video below, they talk about how the desktop has hardly evolved in all the years it’s been around and how we still have the same basic flat desktop, which is pretty true, save for the occasional new sidebar or other third-party applications that try to dress up the desktop but often eat up a lot of memory in the process and rarely introduce new functionality. The video is also a pretty good representation of what you can do with the Pro version. It’s a little more than the free version, and possibly worth the $29, but that’s up to you. Either way, it comes in at only about 60 MB of memory use.

Also in the video above, you’ll note some other cool features that come with the free version. One of these is the ability to automatically sort all items on the desktop by type. Another is the ability to grab a group of objects and stack them in a pile just like you might have a pile of papers on your desk. You can also make items on the desktop or walls bigger or smaller with a simple keystroke. One of my favorites is the ability to search by just typing. Lets say I have a bunch of stacks of photos or documents on my desktop. I can just type “Market Leverage” and it’ll find all the documents with that in their name.

While it would be nice to see more installation support in the FAQ, they’ve really brought a nice product to the table and even before bug fixes, I think this will be sticking around on my computer for the long term.

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