BumpTop
While some of us, myself included, are sometimes tempted by the siren songs of Web 2.0 and announce the desktop as a dead and buried paradigm, others persist in telling us that it’s far from defunct.
What you can see in above’s video is a demo of a 3D desktop prototype, using real physical data to emulate a real life desktop. With it we will be able to order the icons in piles, drop them, wrap them, make them bigger or smaller, classify them, put them on bookshelves, and so on… Taking into account the enthusiast reception to the idea, they’re thinking in making the step from prototype to product and they’re searching for expert C++ and OpenGL developers. More info, on their site, where you can also download a better quality version of this same video.
I have my reservations about the real usefulness of this new desktop system, mainly because of my particular way of using the desktop. While other people have their desktops completely crowded with dozens of icons and documents, I keep it as clean as I can: normally only My PC and the Recycling Bin icons. In my case, the desktop is not a workplace: I only see it just as I’ve started, right before I start opening windows. Curiously, that spartan discipline I impose on my computer desktop has absolutely nothing to do with the very real mess my real desktops are, at home and at work. First BumpTop’s disadvantage would be, then, how easily you could emulate real life mess in your virtual desktop. I can only imagine then that the time I spend re-organising my real-life desktops, and the nanoseconds it takes the mess to reign supreme again, would have their loyal virtual counterpart with BumpTop.
The second disadvantage, for me, is that with something so very beautiful we won’t need the web anymore to procastrinate: we could do it directly on the desktop. 
