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Comments · 23

  1. PieMenus started as Postscript! by JohnQPublic · · Score: 1 · on Google Code Jam 2003 Announced

    Don Hopkins wonderful Pie Menus idea got it's start as an add-on for Sun's aborted NeWS window manager. One of the NeW things about NeWS was that you wrote UI parts in Postscript! P.S. That's not Don in the movie, although he is the one doing the voice-over during the demo.

  2. Browsers, pie menus and gesture recognition by SimHacker · · Score: 1 · on Netscape Founder Says Web Browsing Innovation Dead

    I guess mouse gestures will be there with IE 6.5 or IE 7.0 .. Opera was the 1st implementator in the browser world, there's a plugin for Mozilla and it's a great feature.

    Opera was not the first browser with gestures. HyperTIES supported gestures in the form of pie menus with full mouse-ahead display pre-emption, which I developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction lab during 1988-1991, under the direction of Ben Shneiderman. All this and more was demonstrated in the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57). Here's a streaming quicktime excerpt from the All the Widgets.

    Mozilla was not the first browser with a pie menu plug-in. In 1997 I developed a pie menu ActiveX plug-in for Internet Explorer in C++ (which is not just limited to the browser, but plugs into any application supporting OLE/ActiveX). Here's a streaming quicktime demo of ActiveX pie menus. Here's the ActiveX Pie Menus web page, with the binary ActiveX control, the free open source code, and a description of pie menus.

    Several years later (about a year before Mozilla's Optimoz), I developed another pie menu plug-in for Internet Explorer, implemented in JavaScript, using Dynamic HTML for rendering, and XML for defining the nested tree of pie menus. You can embed arbitrary HTML in the XML pie menu description to control the appearance, and you can write JavaScript handlers not only to handle the menu selections, but also to provide rich dynamic feedback (by modifying the dynamic html and style properties in the fly, in response to mouse motion and clicks).

    Here is the JavaScript Pie Menus web page, with links to examples, documentation, etc.

    But MS has a dillema: to use mouse gestures a user has to read the documentation and memorize what action does what, ( it's a power user tool), but I think reading the docs and memorizing cryptic mouse movements is a bit too much to ask from the average IE user!

    That dilemma dones't apply to pie menus. Pie menus are a visible "self revealing" style of gesture recognition, that prompt the user with directions, as opposed to invisibe "self concealing" gesture recognition that has no way to prompt the user.

    Pie menus are easy for novice users, because they pop up and show all of the possible directions in an intuitive way. They're also efficient for expert users, because you can "mouse ahead" without looking at the screen. Novice users quickly and easily learn to be experts, because the expert mouse-ahead gesture is the same motion and direction as the novice gesture, unlike pull-down menus with function key shortcuts. Learning to select the third "Paste" item on the pull-down "Edit" menu with the mouse does not train you to press Ctrl-V, which is a totally different gesture, so pull-down menus don't support rehearsal.

    The other reason that pie menus are fundamentally better that conventional gesture recognition systems, is that they totally cover 100% of all possible gesture space with meaningful, predictable behavior. Gesture space is the space of all possible gestures, between the beginning of the gesture (pressing down the mouse button, touching the pen to the screen, whatever), to the end of the gesture (releasing the button). The computer has to analyze that gesture and decide what to do, and it's a good thing if does what the human intended more often than not.

    When using a handwr

  3. Browsers, pie menus and gesture recognition by SimHacker · · Score: 1 · on Netscape Founder Says Web Browsing Innovation Dead

    I guess mouse gestures will be there with IE 6.5 or IE 7.0 .. Opera was the 1st implementator in the browser world, there's a plugin for Mozilla and it's a great feature.

    Opera was not the first browser with gestures. HyperTIES supported gestures in the form of pie menus with full mouse-ahead display pre-emption, which I developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction lab during 1988-1991, under the direction of Ben Shneiderman. All this and more was demonstrated in the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57). Here's a streaming quicktime excerpt from the All the Widgets.

    Mozilla was not the first browser with a pie menu plug-in. In 1997 I developed a pie menu ActiveX plug-in for Internet Explorer in C++ (which is not just limited to the browser, but plugs into any application supporting OLE/ActiveX). Here's a streaming quicktime demo of ActiveX pie menus. Here's the ActiveX Pie Menus web page, with the binary ActiveX control, the free open source code, and a description of pie menus.

    Several years later (about a year before Mozilla's Optimoz), I developed another pie menu plug-in for Internet Explorer, implemented in JavaScript, using Dynamic HTML for rendering, and XML for defining the nested tree of pie menus. You can embed arbitrary HTML in the XML pie menu description to control the appearance, and you can write JavaScript handlers not only to handle the menu selections, but also to provide rich dynamic feedback (by modifying the dynamic html and style properties in the fly, in response to mouse motion and clicks).

    Here is the JavaScript Pie Menus web page, with links to examples, documentation, etc.

    But MS has a dillema: to use mouse gestures a user has to read the documentation and memorize what action does what, ( it's a power user tool), but I think reading the docs and memorizing cryptic mouse movements is a bit too much to ask from the average IE user!

    That dilemma dones't apply to pie menus. Pie menus are a visible "self revealing" style of gesture recognition, that prompt the user with directions, as opposed to invisibe "self concealing" gesture recognition that has no way to prompt the user.

    Pie menus are easy for novice users, because they pop up and show all of the possible directions in an intuitive way. They're also efficient for expert users, because you can "mouse ahead" without looking at the screen. Novice users quickly and easily learn to be experts, because the expert mouse-ahead gesture is the same motion and direction as the novice gesture, unlike pull-down menus with function key shortcuts. Learning to select the third "Paste" item on the pull-down "Edit" menu with the mouse does not train you to press Ctrl-V, which is a totally different gesture, so pull-down menus don't support rehearsal.

    The other reason that pie menus are fundamentally better that conventional gesture recognition systems, is that they totally cover 100% of all possible gesture space with meaningful, predictable behavior. Gesture space is the space of all possible gestures, between the beginning of the gesture (pressing down the mouse button, touching the pen to the screen, whatever), to the end of the gesture (releasing the button). The computer has to analyze that gesture and decide what to do, and it's a good thing if does what the human intended more often than not.

    When using a handwr

  4. Re:PizzaTool by SimHacker · · Score: 2 · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here's the PizzaTool manual entry dated March 8 1991, that shipped with OpenWindows.

    ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/NeWS/tnt/pizzatool.6

    Pizzatool used the NeWSPrint PostScript to Fax server that Sun was running for a while.

    I believe Ross Thompson at Adobe wrote a shell script called "burrito" a year or so later. It faxed orders to La Costania, but it was a command line tool without a graphical user interface and PostScript preview window like PizzaTool. (You could actually spin the pizza preview with the mouse.)

    http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/94q1/burritopgm. html

    The first time I faxed a PostScript picture of a pizza to Tony and Alba's, they were quite confused and didn't know what to think, because I had neglected to list the toppings out as text, they were just rendered graphically. So they had to look at the black and white faxed rendering of a pizza, to decypher which toppings I ordered. I took a bug report and fixed the problem by adding the text so they could figure out the subsequent orders.

    Here's a video that includes a demo of the spinning pizza in pizzatool (as well as lots of other weird inexplicable stuff)...

    Streaming: HyperLook SimCity Demo
    Download: HyperLook SimCity Demo

    Demonstration of SimCity running under the HyperLook user interface development system, based on NeWS PostScript. Includes a demonstration of editing HyperLook graphics and user interfaces, the HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, and the HyperLook Happy Tool. Also shows The NeWS Toolkit applications PizzaTool and RasterRap. HyperLook developed by Arthur van Hoff and Don Hopkins at the Turing Institute. SimCity ported to Unix and HyperLook by Don Hopkins. HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, Happy Tool, The NeWS Toolkit, PizzaTool and Raster Rap developed by Don Hopkins. Demonstration, transcript and close captioning by Don Hopkins. Camera and interview by Abbe Don. Taped at the San Francisco Exploratorium.

    -Don

  5. Re:PizzaTool by SimHacker · · Score: 2 · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here's the PizzaTool manual entry dated March 8 1991, that shipped with OpenWindows.

    ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/NeWS/tnt/pizzatool.6

    Pizzatool used the NeWSPrint PostScript to Fax server that Sun was running for a while.

    I believe Ross Thompson at Adobe wrote a shell script called "burrito" a year or so later. It faxed orders to La Costania, but it was a command line tool without a graphical user interface and PostScript preview window like PizzaTool. (You could actually spin the pizza preview with the mouse.)

    http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/94q1/burritopgm. html

    The first time I faxed a PostScript picture of a pizza to Tony and Alba's, they were quite confused and didn't know what to think, because I had neglected to list the toppings out as text, they were just rendered graphically. So they had to look at the black and white faxed rendering of a pizza, to decypher which toppings I ordered. I took a bug report and fixed the problem by adding the text so they could figure out the subsequent orders.

    Here's a video that includes a demo of the spinning pizza in pizzatool (as well as lots of other weird inexplicable stuff)...

    Streaming: HyperLook SimCity Demo
    Download: HyperLook SimCity Demo

    Demonstration of SimCity running under the HyperLook user interface development system, based on NeWS PostScript. Includes a demonstration of editing HyperLook graphics and user interfaces, the HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, and the HyperLook Happy Tool. Also shows The NeWS Toolkit applications PizzaTool and RasterRap. HyperLook developed by Arthur van Hoff and Don Hopkins at the Turing Institute. SimCity ported to Unix and HyperLook by Don Hopkins. HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, Happy Tool, The NeWS Toolkit, PizzaTool and Raster Rap developed by Don Hopkins. Demonstration, transcript and close captioning by Don Hopkins. Camera and interview by Abbe Don. Taped at the San Francisco Exploratorium.

    -Don

  6. Re:historic: Sim City (1993, on sunOS) had pie men by SimHacker · · Score: 2 · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here's a demo of that:

    Streaming: X11 SimCity Demo
    Download: X11 SimCity Demo

    I'm currently working on recasting SimCity as a Python module, for educational uses. There's also the possibility of re-releasing multi player X11 SimCity for Linux as a commercial product, if I can figure out a good way to distribute and support it. But the Curse of the Loki Legacy makes it difficult to find investors who are willing to take the idea of a Linux game seriously.

    Streaming: Linux SimCityNet Demo
    Download: Linux SimCityNet Demo

    -Don

  7. Re:historic: Sim City (1993, on sunOS) had pie men by SimHacker · · Score: 2 · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here's a demo of that:

    Streaming: X11 SimCity Demo
    Download: X11 SimCity Demo

    I'm currently working on recasting SimCity as a Python module, for educational uses. There's also the possibility of re-releasing multi player X11 SimCity for Linux as a commercial product, if I can figure out a good way to distribute and support it. But the Curse of the Loki Legacy makes it difficult to find investors who are willing to take the idea of a Linux game seriously.

    Streaming: Linux SimCityNet Demo
    Download: Linux SimCityNet Demo

    -Don

  8. Re:historic: Sim City (1993, on sunOS) had pie men by SimHacker · · Score: 2 · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here's a demo of that:

    Streaming: X11 SimCity Demo
    Download: X11 SimCity Demo

    I'm currently working on recasting SimCity as a Python module, for educational uses. There's also the possibility of re-releasing multi player X11 SimCity for Linux as a commercial product, if I can figure out a good way to distribute and support it. But the Curse of the Loki Legacy makes it difficult to find investors who are willing to take the idea of a Linux game seriously.

    Streaming: Linux SimCityNet Demo
    Download: Linux SimCityNet Demo

    -Don

  9. Re:historic: Sim City (1993, on sunOS) had pie men by SimHacker · · Score: 2 · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here's a demo of that:

    Streaming: X11 SimCity Demo
    Download: X11 SimCity Demo

    I'm currently working on recasting SimCity as a Python module, for educational uses. There's also the possibility of re-releasing multi player X11 SimCity for Linux as a commercial product, if I can figure out a good way to distribute and support it. But the Curse of the Loki Legacy makes it difficult to find investors who are willing to take the idea of a Linux game seriously.

    Streaming: Linux SimCityNet Demo
    Download: Linux SimCityNet Demo

    -Don

  10. More pie meun demo movies by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

    Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
    Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

    Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
    Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

    This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

    Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
    Download: HyperTIES Demo

    Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

    Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
    Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

    -Don

  11. More pie meun demo movies by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

    Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
    Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

    Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
    Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

    This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

    Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
    Download: HyperTIES Demo

    Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

    Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
    Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

    -Don

  12. More pie meun demo movies by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

    Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
    Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

    Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
    Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

    This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

    Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
    Download: HyperTIES Demo

    Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

    Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
    Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

    -Don

  13. More pie meun demo movies by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

    Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
    Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

    Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
    Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

    This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

    Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
    Download: HyperTIES Demo

    Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

    Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
    Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

    -Don

  14. More pie meun demo movies by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

    Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
    Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

    Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
    Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

    This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

    Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
    Download: HyperTIES Demo

    Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

    Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
    Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

    -Don

  15. More pie meun demo movies by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

    Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
    Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

    Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
    Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

    This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

    Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
    Download: HyperTIES Demo

    Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

    Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
    Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

    -Don

  16. More pie meun demo movies by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

    Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
    Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

    Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
    Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

    This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

    Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
    Download: HyperTIES Demo

    Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

    Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
    Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

    -Don

  17. More pie meun demo movies by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Here is another url to download the quicktime movie itself in case the streaming quicktime movie doesn't work through your firewall or nat gateway.

    Streaming: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.
    Download: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    Here are some earlier demos of tab windows and pie menus in UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the University of Maryland HCIL.

    Streaming: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo
    Download: NeMACS (NeWS Emacs) Demo

    This is a HyperTIES demo, showing embeded graphical links with pop-up images.

    Streaming: HyperTIES Demo
    Download: HyperTIES Demo

    Here's just the pie menus from "All The Widgets", CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Tape produced and narrated by Brad Meyers.

    Streaming: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets
    Download: Just The Pie Menus from All The Widgets

    -Don

  18. Re:Why Pie Menus Can Work by SimHacker · · Score: 5, Informative · on Pie-Menus in Mozilla
    Pie menus are useful in many but certainly not all situations. One major reason they haven't caught on is that most widely available window systems and toolkits don't offer pie menus as a default component, so it's orders of magnitude harder for developers to use pie menus than linear menus. And since most people are understaffed on a tight schedule, they use linear menus instead. I guess you would call that inertia.

    Games are naturally one of the best ways to overcome this inertia, because it's acceptable to experiment with new user interface designs. Often, the whole user interface is part of the game, and designed and coded by hand instead of being built out of off-the-shelf components (like MFC or the Mac Toolbox).

    The pie menus in The Sims required integrating the 2d overlay gui toolkit for the text labels, with the 3d character animation renderer for the head in the center, with real time image processing effects for the shadow. No off-the-shelf software could have possibly supported that, but it wasn't an issue since the entire user interface was custom designed and coded anyway.

    Component software offers a way out of this catch-22 for other more normal applications than games, but it's only starting to catch on, and has its own host of problems and compatibility issues. Nobody can agree on which standards to use, and the standards that aren't obsolete and abandoned just keep changing faster than anyone can keep up.

    It's impossible to design the perfect pie menu component for all applications, because every application has its own unique set of demands. But fortunately it's quite easy to code up special purpose custom pie menus for any particular application, since the algorithm is so simple, especially compared to gesture recognition.

    But pie menus require the application designer to take a lot more care in arranging the menus, than just dumping a bunch of commands into linear menus. Menus with too many items are a bad idea in general, but pie menus with too many items are horrible. So if you're going to use pie menus with a large number of dynamically generated items, the user should be able to scroll through the menus in groups of 8 or so, instead of being faced with a giant pie menus with lots of extremely thin slices.

    Pie menus are quite useful with systems that enable the user to easily customize their own menus. Maya is a great example of an extremely complex system with thousands of commands, that's used in many different specialized ideosynchratic ways by artist for hours on end.

    So it's extremely important that the artists and tool developers be able to design and edit their own menus, so their own personal most commonly used commands are close at hand. Each user uses the same tool in extremely different ways, so they need to be able to customize the interface and build their own menus.

    However, most users aren't trained in interface design, and it would not immediately occur to them to use an even number of items, or that left, right, up and down are faster to select than the diagonal directions. So it's good if the pie menu editor can automatically (unobtrusively and without animated paperclips) assist the user in designing easy-to-use pie menus.

    For example, ActiveX pie menus support features like automatically raising the number of menu items up to 4 or 8 to keep them even, limiting the number of active items to 8 and allowing scrolling, and laying out the items in left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading order instead of circular clockwise or counterclockwise order. There are many other possibly useful features and heuristics to be discovered and implemented.

    The most obviously beneficial applications of pie menus are the window manager and the browser, two applications that users struggle with constantly. Anything that can be done to make such commonly used interfaces quicker and easier will add up to a lot of saved effort over time.

    In the late 80's, we developed a hypermedia browser and authoring tool named "HyperTies" which used pie menus and tabbed windows, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, under the direction of Ben Shneiderman.

    The authoring tool was based on UniPress Emacs with tabbed windows, implemented in NeWS. Emacs, the NeWS window manager and the HyperTIES browser all used pie menus. The browser had a pie menu with left and right for scrolling to the previous and next pages, up going to the index, and down to the table of contents. The pie menu on links let you get a defintion without following the link, follow the link in the current page, or open it up in another page (to the left or the right).

    HyperTIES authors could define their own pie menus with links as well as scripts to control applets written in PostScript. For example, we had a text editor applet and a font selection pie menu that used the distance to smoothly select the font size. (This was years before Java, using Gosling's previous scripting language PostScript in NeWS, and his other previous scriptiong language MockLisp in Emacs).

    The NeWS window manager with pie menus and tab windows was quite satisfying to use, so I redesigned and rewrote it several times in different versions of NeWS. Since Sun cancled NeWS it's not available any more. But here's a streaming Quicktime movie of a demo from around 1992, running on a SparcStation 2: Pie Menu Tab Window Demo.

    -Don

  19. Doug Engelbart's NLS Video clip is online by SimHacker · · Score: 0 · on The Real History of the GUI

    Doug Engelbart's NSL demo is absolutely amazing, like the introduction to The Outer Limits: Do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.

    Here is the classic video of Doug Engelbart demonstrating NLS, on my streaming quicktime server. It's from "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57).

    Streaming version (loads quickly, allows random access, may not work through firewalls):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgetsSt reaming.mov

    Non-streaming version (plays as it loads, 24 megabytes):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgets.m ov

    The online video consists of some excerpts from All The Widgets (the original tape is at least an hour long and surveys all kinds of widgets, most pretty repetitive and boring). The first half of the online video consists of a bunch of pie menu demos that I developed and recorded in the 80's, followed by Doug Engelbart's NLS demo near the middle, and the credits for All The Widgets at the end.

    My thoughts on the article were that it was good, but missed a whole lot of important stuff. The space wasted on fictional cave-man stories would have been better spent discussing actual early research that the article ignored.

    For an excellent classic summary of many important graphical user interfaces that had a lot of influence, I highly recommend "Methodology of Window Management", Proceedings of an Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK; FRA Hopgood, DA Duce, EVC Fielding, Kenneth Robinson, AS Williams (Eds), Springer-Verlag, (1986). No longer in print, but you might find it used or in a good library. It includes some wonderful papers about many important gui systems that weren't mentioned in the article, like James Gosling's original article on "SunDew: a distributed and extensible window system" (which Sun later renamed "NeWS", that I used to implement the pie menus shown in the video, and out of whose ashes arose a popular language called "Java").

    I've published a bunch of my own user interface related demos as streaming quicktime videos on my server. Here's the front page with a link to the index. (The index is an XML file using a style sheet, which Mozilla still doesn't understand, unfortunately.)

    http://www.lushcreations.tv

    If you're interested in gui design, I would recommend the demo of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and the SimAntics visual programming language in The Sims:

    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus Streaming.mov
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus .mov

    -Don

    PS: There is still a bug in SlashDot and/or the IE textarea with the WRAP="VIRTUAL" attribute, that causes long words (like URLs) to have spaces inserted into them, so the text of the URLs above is split with unwanted spaces. The actual HREF links seem to be ok though. Here is what I mean -- the following should be 80 "x" characters, but instead comes out as 50 "x"'s, a space, and 30 more "x"'s:

    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  20. Doug Engelbart's NLS Video clip is online by SimHacker · · Score: 0 · on The Real History of the GUI

    Doug Engelbart's NSL demo is absolutely amazing, like the introduction to The Outer Limits: Do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.

    Here is the classic video of Doug Engelbart demonstrating NLS, on my streaming quicktime server. It's from "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57).

    Streaming version (loads quickly, allows random access, may not work through firewalls):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgetsSt reaming.mov

    Non-streaming version (plays as it loads, 24 megabytes):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgets.m ov

    The online video consists of some excerpts from All The Widgets (the original tape is at least an hour long and surveys all kinds of widgets, most pretty repetitive and boring). The first half of the online video consists of a bunch of pie menu demos that I developed and recorded in the 80's, followed by Doug Engelbart's NLS demo near the middle, and the credits for All The Widgets at the end.

    My thoughts on the article were that it was good, but missed a whole lot of important stuff. The space wasted on fictional cave-man stories would have been better spent discussing actual early research that the article ignored.

    For an excellent classic summary of many important graphical user interfaces that had a lot of influence, I highly recommend "Methodology of Window Management", Proceedings of an Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK; FRA Hopgood, DA Duce, EVC Fielding, Kenneth Robinson, AS Williams (Eds), Springer-Verlag, (1986). No longer in print, but you might find it used or in a good library. It includes some wonderful papers about many important gui systems that weren't mentioned in the article, like James Gosling's original article on "SunDew: a distributed and extensible window system" (which Sun later renamed "NeWS", that I used to implement the pie menus shown in the video, and out of whose ashes arose a popular language called "Java").

    I've published a bunch of my own user interface related demos as streaming quicktime videos on my server. Here's the front page with a link to the index. (The index is an XML file using a style sheet, which Mozilla still doesn't understand, unfortunately.)

    http://www.lushcreations.tv

    If you're interested in gui design, I would recommend the demo of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and the SimAntics visual programming language in The Sims:

    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus Streaming.mov
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus .mov

    -Don

    PS: There is still a bug in SlashDot and/or the IE textarea with the WRAP="VIRTUAL" attribute, that causes long words (like URLs) to have spaces inserted into them, so the text of the URLs above is split with unwanted spaces. The actual HREF links seem to be ok though. Here is what I mean -- the following should be 80 "x" characters, but instead comes out as 50 "x"'s, a space, and 30 more "x"'s:

    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  21. Doug Engelbart's NLS Video clip is online by SimHacker · · Score: 0 · on The Real History of the GUI

    Doug Engelbart's NSL demo is absolutely amazing, like the introduction to The Outer Limits: Do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.

    Here is the classic video of Doug Engelbart demonstrating NLS, on my streaming quicktime server. It's from "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57).

    Streaming version (loads quickly, allows random access, may not work through firewalls):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgetsSt reaming.mov

    Non-streaming version (plays as it loads, 24 megabytes):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgets.m ov

    The online video consists of some excerpts from All The Widgets (the original tape is at least an hour long and surveys all kinds of widgets, most pretty repetitive and boring). The first half of the online video consists of a bunch of pie menu demos that I developed and recorded in the 80's, followed by Doug Engelbart's NLS demo near the middle, and the credits for All The Widgets at the end.

    My thoughts on the article were that it was good, but missed a whole lot of important stuff. The space wasted on fictional cave-man stories would have been better spent discussing actual early research that the article ignored.

    For an excellent classic summary of many important graphical user interfaces that had a lot of influence, I highly recommend "Methodology of Window Management", Proceedings of an Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK; FRA Hopgood, DA Duce, EVC Fielding, Kenneth Robinson, AS Williams (Eds), Springer-Verlag, (1986). No longer in print, but you might find it used or in a good library. It includes some wonderful papers about many important gui systems that weren't mentioned in the article, like James Gosling's original article on "SunDew: a distributed and extensible window system" (which Sun later renamed "NeWS", that I used to implement the pie menus shown in the video, and out of whose ashes arose a popular language called "Java").

    I've published a bunch of my own user interface related demos as streaming quicktime videos on my server. Here's the front page with a link to the index. (The index is an XML file using a style sheet, which Mozilla still doesn't understand, unfortunately.)

    http://www.lushcreations.tv

    If you're interested in gui design, I would recommend the demo of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and the SimAntics visual programming language in The Sims:

    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus Streaming.mov
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus .mov

    -Don

    PS: There is still a bug in SlashDot and/or the IE textarea with the WRAP="VIRTUAL" attribute, that causes long words (like URLs) to have spaces inserted into them, so the text of the URLs above is split with unwanted spaces. The actual HREF links seem to be ok though. Here is what I mean -- the following should be 80 "x" characters, but instead comes out as 50 "x"'s, a space, and 30 more "x"'s:

    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  22. Doug Engelbart's NLS Video clip is online by SimHacker · · Score: 0 · on The Real History of the GUI

    Doug Engelbart's NSL demo is absolutely amazing, like the introduction to The Outer Limits: Do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.

    Here is the classic video of Doug Engelbart demonstrating NLS, on my streaming quicktime server. It's from "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57).

    Streaming version (loads quickly, allows random access, may not work through firewalls):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgetsSt reaming.mov

    Non-streaming version (plays as it loads, 24 megabytes):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgets.m ov

    The online video consists of some excerpts from All The Widgets (the original tape is at least an hour long and surveys all kinds of widgets, most pretty repetitive and boring). The first half of the online video consists of a bunch of pie menu demos that I developed and recorded in the 80's, followed by Doug Engelbart's NLS demo near the middle, and the credits for All The Widgets at the end.

    My thoughts on the article were that it was good, but missed a whole lot of important stuff. The space wasted on fictional cave-man stories would have been better spent discussing actual early research that the article ignored.

    For an excellent classic summary of many important graphical user interfaces that had a lot of influence, I highly recommend "Methodology of Window Management", Proceedings of an Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK; FRA Hopgood, DA Duce, EVC Fielding, Kenneth Robinson, AS Williams (Eds), Springer-Verlag, (1986). No longer in print, but you might find it used or in a good library. It includes some wonderful papers about many important gui systems that weren't mentioned in the article, like James Gosling's original article on "SunDew: a distributed and extensible window system" (which Sun later renamed "NeWS", that I used to implement the pie menus shown in the video, and out of whose ashes arose a popular language called "Java").

    I've published a bunch of my own user interface related demos as streaming quicktime videos on my server. Here's the front page with a link to the index. (The index is an XML file using a style sheet, which Mozilla still doesn't understand, unfortunately.)

    http://www.lushcreations.tv

    If you're interested in gui design, I would recommend the demo of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and the SimAntics visual programming language in The Sims:

    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus Streaming.mov
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus .mov

    -Don

    PS: There is still a bug in SlashDot and/or the IE textarea with the WRAP="VIRTUAL" attribute, that causes long words (like URLs) to have spaces inserted into them, so the text of the URLs above is split with unwanted spaces. The actual HREF links seem to be ok though. Here is what I mean -- the following should be 80 "x" characters, but instead comes out as 50 "x"'s, a space, and 30 more "x"'s:

    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  23. Doug Engelbart's NLS Video clip is online by SimHacker · · Score: 0 · on The Real History of the GUI

    Doug Engelbart's NSL demo is absolutely amazing, like the introduction to The Outer Limits: Do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal.

    Here is the classic video of Doug Engelbart demonstrating NLS, on my streaming quicktime server. It's from "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57).

    Streaming version (loads quickly, allows random access, may not work through firewalls):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgetsSt reaming.mov

    Non-streaming version (plays as it loads, 24 megabytes):
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/AllTheWidgets.m ov

    The online video consists of some excerpts from All The Widgets (the original tape is at least an hour long and surveys all kinds of widgets, most pretty repetitive and boring). The first half of the online video consists of a bunch of pie menu demos that I developed and recorded in the 80's, followed by Doug Engelbart's NLS demo near the middle, and the credits for All The Widgets at the end.

    My thoughts on the article were that it was good, but missed a whole lot of important stuff. The space wasted on fictional cave-man stories would have been better spent discussing actual early research that the article ignored.

    For an excellent classic summary of many important graphical user interfaces that had a lot of influence, I highly recommend "Methodology of Window Management", Proceedings of an Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK; FRA Hopgood, DA Duce, EVC Fielding, Kenneth Robinson, AS Williams (Eds), Springer-Verlag, (1986). No longer in print, but you might find it used or in a good library. It includes some wonderful papers about many important gui systems that weren't mentioned in the article, like James Gosling's original article on "SunDew: a distributed and extensible window system" (which Sun later renamed "NeWS", that I used to implement the pie menus shown in the video, and out of whose ashes arose a popular language called "Java").

    I've published a bunch of my own user interface related demos as streaming quicktime videos on my server. Here's the front page with a link to the index. (The index is an XML file using a style sheet, which Mozilla still doesn't understand, unfortunately.)

    http://www.lushcreations.tv

    If you're interested in gui design, I would recommend the demo of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and the SimAntics visual programming language in The Sims:

    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus Streaming.mov
    http://www.lushcreations.tv/Movies/TheSimsPieMenus .mov

    -Don

    PS: There is still a bug in SlashDot and/or the IE textarea with the WRAP="VIRTUAL" attribute, that causes long words (like URLs) to have spaces inserted into them, so the text of the URLs above is split with unwanted spaces. The actual HREF links seem to be ok though. Here is what I mean -- the following should be 80 "x" characters, but instead comes out as 50 "x"'s, a space, and 30 more "x"'s:

    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx