Within hours of each other, both bumptop and Trillian released shinny new betas. Bumptop and Trillian were invite only for a long time now, both release many beta invites in the past few days. Bumptop is a desktop enhancement, designed for users of tablet pcs, and other touch and pen based media, with easy organization of your desktop, by flinging icons and grouping them as you like. Trillian is a pretty awesome Instant messenger, that supports almost all protocols now, and has just opened up it’s long time closed private beta.

Trillian:
Trillian now supports many new protocols, some which you had to pay for in trillian 3, like Google talk. It is not finished yet by any means, still an alpha release, but it has many nice themes and features, including docking the buddy list, in the same container as your IM tabs. Still many bugs, like the in-ability to add and keep an IRC room in the buddy list, but I’m sure that all will get fixed. Right now you can only connect to a IRC room. It does support MSN now playing, and some different and new ways or sorting a buddy list.

You cannot hide offline buddies yet, but you can group them all together and minimize the group.

Quick Tip-inside the preferences, go to Chat then Instant Loopup and Remove the RSS feeds there, or replace them with your own. This removed the so called ‘ad’ at the top of all chats (not rooms). Why not add our RSS feed there?

Bumptop:
Bumptop released its public beta around 11, only to be mobbed and have several of it’s servers crash within 20 minutes. It was a very anticipated release for many users, who started getting their beta invites last last week.
Bumptop is a ‘desktop enhancement’ not a shell replacement. It works on top of your existing desktop, (and does not mess up your icons there) and does not kill explorer.exe, but rather created a 3D desktop, with a lot of emphasis on physics. For example, you can fling icons around the desktop (works much better with a stylus or mutlitouch, then with a mouse or tracpad)and those icons or folders bounce around a bit, rebound off walls, and come crashing into other icons. You can throw your IE icon as much as you want! I did that quite a bit when I first tried it as a public beta.
By double-clicking the corners or walls, you can bring up other views, like this below.

To group or otherwise do anything with more than one icon, you hold down the left mouse button and drag a lasso around the icons, then with a right click, a circular menu appears from which you can do anything in bumptop, or get to the normal windows context menu.

There is also a scrolling feature for large piles (I’m pretty sure this is only for people who are/were beta testers, but I shall confirm that later) In this case this pile is 127 PDF files and a few Jpegs. The best part is, I don’t have to have them all on the desktop, they’re inside a folder on the desktop and through an option called Expand to Pile, I can keep them inside the folder(on my Real windows desktop, not bumptop, for easy moving, but bumptop see it, as if they were on all on my desktop. Pretty. Awesome.

When you close the scrolled pile, this happens, and it’s awesome eyecandy.

You see the Twitter Icon? Well Bumptop will also automatically post, whatever you drag onto that icon, onto your twitter. There is also a similar icon for Facebook, in addition to flickr and other photo galleries (local and internet) that show slideshows as you work.

These two shinny new beta provide a lot of functionality and eye candy for anyone’s desktop, I would recommend testing them out, so far, everyone I talked to loves them, but remember they’re still betas, and aren’t fit for widespread use, although I have had no issues with either one.

Within hours of each other, both bumptop and Trillian released shinny new betas. Bumptop and Trillian were invite only for a long time now, both release many beta invites in the past few days. Bumptop is a desktop enhancement, designed for users of tablet pcs, and other touch and pen based media, with easy organization of your desktop, by flinging icons and grouping them as you like. Trillian is a pretty awesome Instant messenger, that supports almost all protocols now, and has just opened up it’s long time closed private beta.

Trillian:
Trillian now supports many new protocols, some which you had to pay for in trillian 3, like Google talk. It is not finished yet by any means, still an alpha release, but it has many nice themes and features, including docking the buddy list, in the same container as your IM tabs. Still many bugs, like the in-ability to add and keep an IRC room in the buddy list, but I’m sure that all will get fixed. Right now you can only connect to a IRC room. It does support MSN now playing, and some different and new ways or sorting a buddy list.

You cannot hide offline buddies yet, but you can group them all together and minimize the group.

Quick Tip-inside the preferences, go to Chat then Instant Loopup and Remove the RSS feeds there, or replace them with your own. This removed the so called ‘ad’ at the top of all chats (not rooms). Why not add our RSS feed there?

Bumptop:
Bumptop released its public beta around 11, only to be mobbed and have several of it’s servers crash within 20 minutes. It was a very anticipated release for many users, who started getting their beta invites last last week.
Bumptop is a ‘desktop enhancement’ not a shell replacement. It works on top of your existing desktop, (and does not mess up your icons there) and does not kill explorer.exe, but rather created a 3D desktop, with a lot of emphasis on physics. For example, you can fling icons around the desktop (works much better with a stylus or mutlitouch, then with a mouse or tracpad)and those icons or folders bounce around a bit, rebound off walls, and come crashing into other icons. You can throw your IE icon as much as you want! I did that quite a bit when I first tried it as a public beta.
By double-clicking the corners or walls, you can bring up other views, like this below.

To group or otherwise do anything with more than one icon, you hold down the left mouse button and drag a lasso around the icons, then with a right click, a circular menu appears from which you can do anything in bumptop, or get to the normal windows context menu.

There is also a scrolling feature for large piles (I’m pretty sure this is only for people who are/were beta testers, but I shall confirm that later) In this case this pile is 127 PDF files and a few Jpegs. The best part is, I don’t have to have them all on the desktop, they’re inside a folder on the desktop and through an option called Expand to Pile, I can keep them inside the folder(on my Real windows desktop, not bumptop, for easy moving, but bumptop see it, as if they were on all on my desktop. Pretty. Awesome.

When you close the scrolled pile, this happens, and it’s awesome eyecandy.

You see the Twitter Icon? Well Bumptop will also automatically post, whatever you drag onto that icon, onto your twitter. There is also a similar icon for Facebook, in addition to flickr and other photo galleries (local and internet) that show slideshows as you work.

These two shinny new beta provide a lot of functionality and eye candy for anyone’s desktop, I would recommend testing them out, so far, everyone I talked to loves them, but remember they’re still betas, and aren’t fit for widespread use, although I have had no issues with either one.