"BumpTop (for both Windows and Mac) will no longer be available for sale. Additionally, no updates to the products are planned."

Google's plans for the organizing software are uncertain but the growth in mobile could indicate a direction. The simple fight between Apple and Google for the best interface could also come into play.

"Among some of BumpTop's most interesting features are its innovative, free-form method of selecting items on the desktop, the ability to flip through piles of files (with your mouse-wheel, or through an actual flipping motion if you have a touch-screen), and its highly intuitive pie menu system"

Wellington Financial estimated the sale at $35-40 million.

While the Mac doesn't offer multi-touch screens, BumpTop managed to incorporate some multi-touch gestures by using the touchpad on Mac laptops (these are only available in the Pro version). Swiping down with three fingers, for example, creates a new stack of files on your desktop. If you are using a desktop or an older laptop, however, you will not be able to make use of these gestures.

Mac Version Give You a More Seamless Experience

For the Mac version, the BumpTop team has tweaked the user interface so that it fits in nicely with the rest of the OSX experience. BumpTop still suffers from a slight disconnect between the desktop experience and running an application. Switching to the application takes you out of the 3D experience. Interestingly enough, this effect is less pronounced on the Mac than on Windows. On the Mac, BumpTop just becomes a seamless part of your desktop and stays out of the way. On Windows, BumpTop often feels more like an additional application than an integral part of the OS.

For a more detailed look at BumpTop's feature set, have a look at our earlier review of the Windows version.

Get a Free Pro Version

The free version of BumpTop incorporates most of the most interesting features in the software, but the Pro version ($29) includes a number of cool additional features like multi-touch gestures, unlimited sticky notes on your desktop and a find-as-you-type feature that makes it easy to find documents on your desktop.

The Pro version is a free upgrade to the first 100 people who sign up at this special ReadWriteWeb page.

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).

BumpTop has given us 200 free pro versions to give away to our readers. You can find details about how to claim yours at the end of this post.

We could describe BumpTop in every singly detail, but the best way to experience it is really to see it in action:

Among some of BumpTop's most interesting features are its innovative, free-form method of selecting items on the desktop, the ability to flip through piles of files (with your mouse-wheel, or through an actual flipping motion if you have a touch-screen), and its highly intuitive pie menu system, which you invoke to sort files on the desktop or to create new piles, for example. To search for a file on the desktop, by the way, you just have to start typing.

Twitter and Facebook on Your Desktop

Since its last couple of releases, BumpTop has added a number of new features, including drag and drop support for Twitter and Facebook. Now, you only need to drop a picture onto the big Twitter or Facebook icons on your desktop, and they will be uploaded to Twitpic and/or your Facebook photo account. You can also now subscribe to any Media RSS feed (from Flickr, for example), and the photos on your background will regularly update with new pictures from this feed. After you zoom in to a picture, you can use a simple swiping motion with your mouse or finger to move to the next picture.

Reinventing the Desktop

BumpTop, at its core, is trying to reinvent the desktop as we know it. While we have our choice of desktop environments today (Windows, OSX, KDE, GNOME, etc.), the core experience between them doesn't really vary too much. The basic principles, like organizing files in folders, for example, might look different, but the basic functionality is always the same.

With BumpTop, however, users can recreate their own physical desktops, which aren't usually organized in neat folders. Indeed, most computer desktops, are also cluttered with random files that were just saved on the desktop without any regard for organization.

That's where the power of BumpTop comes in. While organizing files in folders might sounds good, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=288392.288596">studies from Microsoft going back as far as 1998 has shown that we are usually far better at recalling information from our spatial memory than at recalling information from texts.

Agarawala acknowledged that BumpTop might not be for everyone. He did, however, also stress that BumpTop does not use any gratuitous 3D effects for the sake of it. And indeed, the 3D part of BumpTop is relatively subdued and only really comes into play  when you zoom in to the pictures on the wall or when you create (and destroy) piles of files on your desktop.

Coming Soon: APIs, Connected Desktops, and, at some point, a Mac Version

Agarawala and his team also have big plans for BumpTop's future. Not only are they planning to open up an API which will allow developers to create widgets on top of BumpTop, but BumpTop also plans to connect multiple desktops with each other over the Internet in the future, which would allow coworkers to easily move documents from one desktop to another.

The BumpTop team also plans to release a Mac version in the future, but given the size of the team, the company is currently focusing on the Windows platform first.

Verdict

There can also be no doubt that there is some novelty factor to the application, though unlike many other similar projects, BumpTop doesn't feel gimmicky and actually provides a number of very useful features. It is easy to get sidetracked by the cool visuals, but underneath all of this, BumpTop actually provides some very compelling functionality.

In our interview last week, Agarawala freely acknowledged that BumpTop might not work for everyone. While it is easy to suspend your disbelief as you are working in the BumpTop environment, any application that you start outside of the app will quickly bring you back to reality (though the BumpTop team does have some ideas for how to solve this problem as well). If you are interested in trying out a new desktop, however, then BumpTop is definitely worth a try.

Get Your Free Pro Version

BumpTop comes in two versions: a free version, which only includes support for two post It notes, and which doesn't feature pile flipping, multi-touch support, and another cool feature that automatically makes frequently used files. BumpTop Pro version, which will sell for $29, includes all of these features, as well as the ability to 'toss' files to USB keys and CDs.

If you are one of the first 200 readers to follow this link and leave your email address, BumpTop will send you a license key for the Pro version.