stacks, bumptop and piles... oh my
Eric and I watched the liveblogging coming out of the WWDC on Monday with excitement. The biggest announcement, in my opinion, was Leopard's new "stacks" feature.
Perhaps this isn't as big a deal as I think it is, but I think that anything that lurches the desktop metaphor forward is worth some applause.
... thing is, this has existed in some form for years. As a cult of mac post points out, Apple holds a ten-year-old patent on the idea (as "piles").
And while Apple will probably do it well, BumpTop, developed by Anand Agarawala at U of T seems to do it much better. Agarawala's BumpTop demo on YouTube has been making the rounds in the HCI community and what's specifically impressed me is the workable, real physics that he's incorporated. By modeling your files as physical tiles he's brought the computer desktop one step closer to a physical desktop, allowing true three-dimensional positioning, and (importantly) positioning of files with respect to other files.
It was a huge step forward in computing when we moved from command interfaces to the desktop metaphor. (Obligatory links to Engelbart, PARC and Mac OS.) It's going to be an equally big step (or perhaps a series of small steps) bringing the desktop out of the computer and back onto your desk.
