Ugly piles

The problem seems to only show up on folders and other icons that are not rectangle. Icons that use transparency seem to not render correctly at the edges so those ugly borders show up.

See the screenshot below ...

You beat me to it with the screen shot but that is the same issue I have here.

The problem is that the icons are applied to boxes, but because the alpha channel dosn't go all the way to the edge, they edges show. A solution would be to exclude alpha channels and add a neutral grey behind them, making them complete boxes.

I like the way "RealDesktop" handles this:

The icons are real boxes and the transparency is filled with of some kind of glass or any other texture. This way users are also able to apply custom textures to make their icons fit to their BumpTop Theme.
For example: If you have a wooden theme applied to your desktop, your icons could also be made of wood, in my case they would be some kind of cardboard, for a science fiction theme it would be metal etc.
This way the icons also feel more physical

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_iTaLcwgM1Uc/SII...

Yeah, I know, "RealDesktop" a competitive product.
But this is the best solution for this problem and it looks really good imho.

Completely agreed with Seven-D. This way icons appears more naturally

Here is a suggestion how icons with transparency (or icons in general) could look like. Simple, clean and effective.

Everything that is grey transparent in this pictures could be customized by the user by changing the color of the glass or applying a texture to it, like wood, metal, paper or anything else to make it fit to the individual themes.
Also it would be nice to be able to change the transparency. So you could make them look solid if there is a texture applied to it (like real metal plates for example) or more transparent for a more subtle colored glass feel.

Perhaps a little specular effect would emphasize the glass look.

Well ... just a suggestion.

Seven-D.
+1

I agree, the ability to define a texture to use for the other faces would be great. And an optional specular would add a nice touch (depending on the theme), but most likely increase rendering time(but it's optional..so).

actually i think the icons anyways looked better in the beginning.. they looked much "bump-toppyer" in the first video that was shown ..

If the icon fills out the entire square it looks decent (apart from the stretched image), but in a circular icon with transparency, the border is clearly visible. The Firefox icon is a good example. In my screenshot, the Firefox icon is in a small pile in Flip page mode, rotated so that the side of the box is visible. You can clearly see the Firefox icon stretched out to fill the thin side of the box. This icon from the top-down is stretched and skewed to perspective and seems to be the cause of the ugly border. I agree that Seven-D's/RealDesktop's solution deals with this quite well.

how about making the pile look neater? I very particular about house keeping. I alway feel that my house keeping in bumptop is not 100% good

well i kinda like how it's not a neat pile but just making the boreder around the edge would be nice