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Some more notes on the multi player SimCity user interface from a talk I gave about pie menus at Xerox PARC in 1998:

Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus

Multi player voting on important issues and expensive zones.

Voting dialogs require unanimous vote of all players to do important things like change tax rate, build expensive buildings, quit the game (although anyone can quit themselves, everyone must agree to shut the whole game down). Any person can dissent by pressing cancel button. OK button requires each person to press it. The beveled edges are extra thick: as many times thicker than usual, as there are yes votes required. As each person votes "yes" it lowers one normal thickness down deeper, until the last vote fully depresses it.

Bouncing building gets closer to ground as more people vote for them., Finally falls "down to earth" as the last person votes for it. Any person can cancel a vote since they require unanimous consent. Bouncing buildings also display a parallel multi player voting dialog, and the bouncing building is a shortcut to the dialog. To vote yes, you just place the same building in the same place. To change the proposed location, you place the same building somewhere else, and it resets to only having your vote.

-Don

You don't need to read back anything from the GPU

The Sims does, so that it can turn the pixels behind the pie menu into grayscale (pic). Or can/should that be handled with a shader now?

XPCOM extensions for Firefox are compiled binary machine language files, which have just as much access to your system as ActiveX controls do. Firefox XPCOM extensions are no more secure than ActiveX controls. Binary ActiveX and XPCOM controls are useful for situations where you need to do things that JavaScript doesn't support, like shaping the window of a pie menu (an open source ActiveX component, that you can download the source code if you like).

Internet Explorer has something similar to the way you can write Firefox extensions in JavaScript and UIL. But that's a totally different thing than binary ActiveX controls and behaviors, and it severly restricts what you can do.

You can script trustable ActiveX controls for Internet Explorer called "Dynamic HTML Behavior Components", using JavaScript (or any other ActiveX compatible scripting languages), XML and DHTML.

For example, user interface components like JavaScript Pie Menus for Internet Explorer or the Run On Sentence dynamic text animation style run with the same restrictions as JavaScript in the browser, so they can't access files or shape popup windows. (Also open source).

-Don

XPCOM extensions for Firefox are compiled binary machine language files, which have just as much access to your system as ActiveX controls do. Firefox XPCOM extensions are no more secure than ActiveX controls. Binary ActiveX and XPCOM controls are useful for situations where you need to do things that JavaScript doesn't support, like shaping the window of a pie menu (an open source ActiveX component, that you can download the source code if you like).

Internet Explorer has something similar to the way you can write Firefox extensions in JavaScript and UIL. But that's a totally different thing than binary ActiveX controls and behaviors, and it severly restricts what you can do.

You can script trustable ActiveX controls for Internet Explorer called "Dynamic HTML Behavior Components", using JavaScript (or any other ActiveX compatible scripting languages), XML and DHTML.

For example, user interface components like JavaScript Pie Menus for Internet Explorer or the Run On Sentence dynamic text animation style run with the same restrictions as JavaScript in the browser, so they can't access files or shape popup windows. (Also open source).

-Don

XPCOM extensions for Firefox are compiled binary machine language files, which have just as much access to your system as ActiveX controls do. Firefox XPCOM extensions are no more secure than ActiveX controls. Binary ActiveX and XPCOM controls are useful for situations where you need to do things that JavaScript doesn't support, like shaping the window of a pie menu (an open source ActiveX component, that you can download the source code if you like).

Internet Explorer has something similar to the way you can write Firefox extensions in JavaScript and UIL. But that's a totally different thing than binary ActiveX controls and behaviors, and it severly restricts what you can do.

You can script trustable ActiveX controls for Internet Explorer called "Dynamic HTML Behavior Components", using JavaScript (or any other ActiveX compatible scripting languages), XML and DHTML.

For example, user interface components like JavaScript Pie Menus for Internet Explorer or the Run On Sentence dynamic text animation style run with the same restrictions as JavaScript in the browser, so they can't access files or shape popup windows. (Also open source).

-Don

The one button mouse never made sense because you need two: one to select a noun and the other to select a verb. Fitt's law says that you want the verb button to pop up a pie menu in place. So, pick with the left, and act on it using the right.
-russ

Actually ... mouse gestures are better implemented as Pie Menus.
-russ

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.

Menus are an important special case as they are typically the only user interface elements not managed by the window manager.

An application would define a property, WM_MENU, on any window that needs a menu. The property would be a list of menu items, each similar to the structs used in just about every windowing system, and allowing recursive definitions of other menus by pointing to other window properties. Applications wouldn't have to respond to the menu events, only to the final selection. The advantages would be many.

• Applications could be smaller, since they won't have to manage the menus.
• Applications, especially those running remotely from the display server, would seem more responsive to the user because the menu would be handled locally.
• Best of all, window managers could offer more choice in menu bars.

Once you know the direction of the pie menu item you want, you can quickly select it without even looking at the screen, by mousing ahead. It's like using a keyboard accelerator, but without moving your hand from the mouse to the keyboard and back. The accelerated action is exactly the same as the unaccelerated action, only faster.

But selecting from a linear menu is not rehearsal for using the keyboard accelerator, because typing on the keyboard is a completely different action than selecting from the menu with the mouse, so you have twice as many actions to learn. To use the keyboard accelerator, you have to learn a completely new command that has nothing to do with the menu, and interrupts the flow of mouse actions.

It takes at least a second to move your hand between the mouse and keyboard and readjust, so it's important to provide keyboard equivalents for commands you'll be using while typing. I'm not suggesting removing keyboard accelerators when adding pie menus. Pie menus have their own built-in accelerators (mousing ahead without looking), that is extremely easy to use if you're already pointing and clicking with the mouse (which is the case with a game like The Sims, that doesn't use the keyboard very much).

Of course there's no reason why you couldn't assign traditional keyboard accelerators to individual pie menu items. The ActiveX pie menus have full support for keyboard navigation, so you can select and navigate and use all their features from the keyboard as well as the mouse.

Four item and eight item pie menus map very nicely to the arrow keys and numeric keypad. The ActiveX pie menus can automatically limit the maximum number of items per pie menu to eight, and let you page up and down through arbitrarily long menus in groups of eight items at a time, with the mouse or keyboard.

The newer JavaScript Pie Menus for Internet Explorer don't support keyboard navigation yet. Here's a description of many of the features of the older ActiveX pie menus, which are fancier but don't integrate with the web page as nicely or support dynamic HTML rendering and XML configuration like the newer Javascript pie menus.

-Don

Once you know the direction of the pie menu item you want, you can quickly select it without even looking at the screen, by mousing ahead. It's like using a keyboard accelerator, but without moving your hand from the mouse to the keyboard and back. The accelerated action is exactly the same as the unaccelerated action, only faster.

But selecting from a linear menu is not rehearsal for using the keyboard accelerator, because typing on the keyboard is a completely different action than selecting from the menu with the mouse, so you have twice as many actions to learn. To use the keyboard accelerator, you have to learn a completely new command that has nothing to do with the menu, and interrupts the flow of mouse actions.

It takes at least a second to move your hand between the mouse and keyboard and readjust, so it's important to provide keyboard equivalents for commands you'll be using while typing. I'm not suggesting removing keyboard accelerators when adding pie menus. Pie menus have their own built-in accelerators (mousing ahead without looking), that is extremely easy to use if you're already pointing and clicking with the mouse (which is the case with a game like The Sims, that doesn't use the keyboard very much).

Of course there's no reason why you couldn't assign traditional keyboard accelerators to individual pie menu items. The ActiveX pie menus have full support for keyboard navigation, so you can select and navigate and use all their features from the keyboard as well as the mouse.

Four item and eight item pie menus map very nicely to the arrow keys and numeric keypad. The ActiveX pie menus can automatically limit the maximum number of items per pie menu to eight, and let you page up and down through arbitrarily long menus in groups of eight items at a time, with the mouse or keyboard.

The newer JavaScript Pie Menus for Internet Explorer don't support keyboard navigation yet. Here's a description of many of the features of the older ActiveX pie menus, which are fancier but don't integrate with the web page as nicely or support dynamic HTML rendering and XML configuration like the newer Javascript pie menus.

-Don

Apparently Alias/Waverfront calls their menus "Marking Menus", and has trademarked that term, but they are very similar to pie menus, if not exactly the same. There's more info on the Piemenus.com site.

People expect Linux to work like Microsoft. They expect the same windows/mouse/pointer user interface. There's plenty of innovation, but people don't want it. For example, we in the open source world have Pie Menus. They are measureably better (faster and more reliable) than Microsoft's linear menus. If you give people a choice between pie menus and linear menus, which do you think they'll choose?

They'll choose the one that requires the least retraining on their part. THAT is why Microsoft products get cloned.
-russ