Every person and their dog has been writing about the cool looking 3-D desktop called BumpTop. But I’m not going to let that stop me.

I saw a demo of BumpTop by it’s creator, Anand Agarawala, at DemoCamp Toronto (next DemoCamp in Toronto is July 4th if you’re interested) recently and was really impressed. If you haven’t seen it already, go check it out and watch the video (You Tube, low-res version).

The gist of the system is that it allows you to organise your documents more as you would in the real world. You can put them in neat stacks, throw similar documents into messy stacks (which scream ’sort me’) and flick through a pile with a gesture. All this is powered by a 3-D physics engine (I think) so the motion of objects within the space has a feeling of reality to it.

Merlin Mann (one of my favourite bloggers) who writes about productivity at 43 Folders makes some good points about how this way of interacting with files in general doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that it could be a fantastic interface for other types of online tasks, video editors throwing together a pile of scenes say, or conference organisers dropping speaker objects into rooms and tracks.

I don’t know where this idea’s going to go, but it seems like the confluence of huge amounts of data the average person now manages and the incredible graphics capabilities of the average desktop computer must come together somehow.

This post will be of interest to a certain subset of Canadians only, but as I’m in that subset I’m going to write it.

I came across an interesting press release from Primus about there plans to launch ADSL2+ service in Canada:

‘[Primus are constructing] a local colocation network covering three million households and businesses in five Canadian provinces. This phase of the network build uses ADSL2+ technology and will be largely complete by the end of June 2006…

…ADSL2+ technology offers Internet access speeds up to of 22 Mbps (Megabits per second) to consumers…’

Yep, that’s 22Mbps. And I got excited when Sympatico upped my DSL line to 5Mbps a month or two ago. By my calculations, at 22Mbps you could download a full, uncompressed DVD quality movie in about 30 minutes. This is nearly the fibre to the home that we ought to have by now, flying cars can’t be far behind.