Pie-Menus in Mozilla

pronik writes "The Optimoz project on MozDev had two main development branches. While the first one, Mouse Gestures have been a success, we had to wait for the second, also very promising one: PieMenus. Now the wait is over! First implementation of PieMenus for Mozilla - RadialContext - is available for installation and testing!!!"

Comments

that useful?

[xmnemonic]

Is this really that useful or merely just pretty? Hmm

Re:that useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually very useful. You don't need to look at the menu to click. If you preform an action often, you can just click, move, and click without even having to check where you moved your mouse too exactly. Less movement required to get to each button, and no chance of under-moving or over-moving and hitting something unintentionally. Kudos to whomever thought of this.

Re:that useful?

[mad_cow]

There's apparently been a bunch of research into their use and if I recall correctly, one of their biggest benefits is that they simplify complex menu navigation. Or something like that, anyways.

They've already found use in other places... the Sims and Neverwinter Nights are the two that come to mind.

Re:that useful?

[wadetemp]

I personally don't consider it to be that useful. It doesn't do anything that keyboard accelerators don't do, unless you can't type a single key accurately.

My biggest beef with it is it forces your mouse to have to move away from the selected item. Keyboard shortcuts don't move the mouse pointer or the focus anywhere, so you are ready to move onto the next task without trying to find out where your pointer went when you were doing a "no look" command.

Re:that useful?

[capnjack41]

Sometimes useful, yes. but necessarily? Some things are just natural in list format.

But for a menu of 4 or 6 items I suppose it can be a lot easier on the ol carpal tunnels, and perhaps aesthetically nicer. In any event, worthwhile being supported.

Re:that useful?

[ArnoldYabenson]

How do you select a link and create a bookmark of it using a keyboard shortcut? And what the hell is a "keyboard accelerator?" You mean the setting that speeds up key-repeat?

Re:that useful?

[Elbereth]

Well, it's nowhere near as nice as pressing "alt-f4" or "control-v", for instance. I've still got Wordstar keystrokes memorized, and I use them all the time in editors and word processors. After twenty years or so, my fingers automatically go for "control-k" whenever I want to do something. Much better than moving the mouse to some obscure pop-up menu. Well, IMHO.

Re:that useful?

[wadetemp]

In IE, I right click it and push F. I would assume it is similar in Mozilla... if they have accelerators. Keyboard accelerator is the fancy word for "key you press rather than selecting the item on the menu with the mouse."

Re:that useful?

[Shinobi]

Some 3D-apps have had them for a long time. SoftImage and PowerAnimator had them when I first saw them, in 1995, Maya has similar menus etc

Re:that useful?

[Dthoma]

"This is actually very useful. You don't need to look at the menu to click. If you preform an action often, you can just click, move, and click without even having to check where you moved your mouse too exactly."

I know! Aren't drop-down menus just great?!

;-)

Re:that useful?

[ArnoldYabenson]

"Keyboard accelerator" is a fancy misnomer for a keyboard shortut, since your keyboard is not accelerated. Excuse me for what many would term a quibble, but that is a torture of the language, IMO.

You did not answer my main question yet: How do you select a link and create a bookmark of it using a keyboard shortcut?

You left out the "select a link" part. Conveniently, I might add.

Re:that useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not meant to be better than short-cut/access keys - there's not supposed to The Best Interface regardless of input device or personal preference, right?

However pie menus generally beat all other context menus. More specifically, piemenus only work well when not at the edges of the screen because your mouse needs to be in the centre of the circle, and it can't be at the edge of the screen.

Re:that useful?

[DrSkwid]

Whaterver your perceptions mouse responses are quicker, it's been timed.

Re:that useful?

[wadetemp]

You did not answer my main question yet: How do you select a link and create a bookmark of it using a keyboard shortcut? You left out the "select a link" part. Conveniently, I might add.

As I said before, you right click the link (that selects it... a mouse click is also required for most pie menus) and then push the F key (the F key is equivalent to moving the mouse down and clicking on the "Add to Favorites" option, except that you don't have to move the mouse or click.)

Accelerator, shortcut, they're the same thing. Your keyboard doesn't have shortcuts either... but your keyboard *does* allow you to accelerate/shortcut your tasks by not involving the mouse or reading of menu options on the screen.

Re:that useful?

[Arandir]

It doesn't do anything that keyboard accelerators don't do, unless you can't type a single key accurately.

You mean use a keyboard? You have got to be kidding! That's absolutely jurassic! No one uses the keyboard anymore but introvert Linux geeks jacking off to the command line.

Seriously, I'm with you. I just don't get the idea behind mouse gestures, pie menus and all the other crap getting in the way of usability.

Here's a usability idea: use the mouse intelligently. Keep one hand on a decent three button mouse that fits your palm, the other hand on the keyboard, and you have LMB, CMB, RMB, Ctrl, Alt, Shift and Meta to do all your work. All you need is for the application to support it, or your system to map the actions to what you want. Think about it. You never have to move your hands (if you have a trackball, that's literal), you'll learn it quickly, and you'll never accidently perform a gesture if you sneeze at the wrong time.

Re:that useful?

[SimHacker]

Drop down menus can't support mouse-ahead as well as pie menus, because pie menus are based on direction, and you don't have to look at the screen to know reliably which direction you move the mouse.

So you can mouse ahead through a pie menus reliably, because it's the direction, not the distance that matters.

But with drop-down menus, the distance is what matters, and the direction is always the same: down (which suggests that alternative possibilities are being wasted: the other directions). It requires your full visual attention for the hand-eye feedback loop, to position the mouse over the correct target rectangle, merely as tall as the font height.

Selecting one small rectangle below your cursor requires much more attention and precision than selecting one large pie slice, each in a different direction.

Fitts' Law predicted it: the larger and closer the target, the faster and easier it is to hit. The experiments have proven it. But close-minded people are still stubbornly resistant to change, as it has always been and always will be.

-Don

Re:that useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's awesome that mozilla is encorporating this function. Like opera, for instance, I remember the first time I made a mouse gesture in there, but not knowing about it, and thought what a kickass idea.

And Galeon with the right mouse button for moving back.. And then there's ole Explorer, with it's seemingly more and more klunky interface.

Re:that useful?

[DGolden]

Have a play with this "FlyMenu" example I wrote one time.

Re:that useful?

[ArnoldYabenson]

1. Exactly - you accelerate your tasks. Your keyboard is not accelerated. Combining keys does not make your keyboard faster; that's like calling shorthand a "pencil accelerator." Really it's a quibble, my problem thanks to a liberal arts education. Your mileage varies, that's fine, don't worry about it.

2. Your orginal post, which raised my question, hailed the benefits of not moving the mouse pointer. But you do move your mouse pointer. As long as your mouse-hand is in action, a pie menu seems a reasonable alternative to getting the other hand involved; thus leaving one hand totally free for vital multitasks: for snacking, for twiddling the remote, for twiddling yourself, etcetera.

Re:that useful?

[DGolden]

Sorry - my previous comment (sibling of this one) might merit a bit more information:

While this flies in the face of conventional UI dogma - the mouse behaviour is "different" for the menus - It's not _very_ different, especially since the scrolling of the menus underneath makes it look like the mouse is moving as usual.

The alternative is post-menu warpback, but I tried that too, and found it much more annoying than the scrolling effect my example illustrates.

FlyMenu
Here you can download a mockup of a proposal for scrolling menus, that would make using popup menus in art packages and the like a lot easier.

flymenu.jar (11K)
Requires a 1.3 JVM
Start with java -jar flymenu.jar

Explanation:
_Current Situation:_
When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears. you move the mouse.
"""Moving the mouse causes the mouse pointer to move.
You use this to select an entry from the menu. Menu then disappears and your action is carried out.
"""Mouse pointer is in a quite different position to where you left it before pressing RMB.

_Suggested Situation:_
When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears. you move the mouse.
***Moving the mouse causes popup-menu to scroll underneath the (stationary relative to physical screen) mouse pointer.
You use this to select an entry from the menu. Menu then disappears and your action is carried out.
***Mouse pointer is exactly where you left it before pressing RMB.

Re:that useful?

[GutBomb]

Your orginal post, which raised my question, hailed the benefits of not moving the mouse pointer.

partially correct. his post stated that he did not like the idea of moving the mouse pointer off of the selected object . while he does not mind moving the mouse pointer there, once it is selected he does not want to move it again, presumably so he knows which object he is working with (i don't really know or care, but if that is the case, isn't that what the focus is for?)

Re:that useful?

[LithiumCarbonate]

test

Re:that useful?

[Com2Kid]

Here's a usability idea: use the mouse intelligently. Keep one hand on a decent three button mouse that fits your palm, the other hand on the keyboard, and you have LMB, CMB, RMB, Ctrl, Alt, Shift and Meta to do all your work. All you need is for the application to support it, or your system to map the actions to what you want. Think about it. You never have to move your hands (if you have a trackball, that's literal), you'll learn it quickly, and you'll never accidently perform a gesture if you sneeze at the wrong time.


I bought a nine button mouse and mapped the various extra buttons to keyboard hotkeys.

Solved allll my browsing problems. :P (err what problems?)

Re:that useful?

[rseuhs]

I use the mouse with my right hand and rest the left hand on the keyboard which closes a Window on "Ctrl+Esc" (my custom setting, whoever thought up Alt+F4 should be shot).

I open new links with the middle mousebutton and when I go back close the Window. Can't become any faster than that.

(But it doesn't work with Mozilla-Tabs, is there any way to make Mozilla close a Tab by hitting Esc?) I couldn't find any keybindings...

Re:that useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, sorry, pie menus are only quicker when used towards the center of the screen, and when the number of menu options are 8 or less. If you try to use a pie menu towards of the edge of the screen, or there are more then 8 options, all hell breaks loose, and pie menus become magnitudes of times slower than a simple list of items.

Re:that useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you mean like going right-click, down and right a little bit, then releasing to back up?

Oh wait, but they broke that right before 1.0, all in the name of "usability". Now you have to either find a part of the page that isn't an image, do ALT+wheel down, or go all the way over to the back button at the top. You're also similarly screwed if you have any text highlighted, whether intentionally or accidentally.

Nothing like breaking something that's been programmed into our hands for quite a few years.

Re:that useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

All menu choices are a constant distance from the middle of the "pie."

Re:that useful?

[tomhudson]

Keyboard shortcuts are quicker. Have always been. Always will be. Mouse movements are only quicker in certain situations, but certainly not for selecting menus.

Mouse movements are only quicker for people who can't remember the keyboard shortcuts.

Think about it - every word processing program around has at least a few keyboard shortcuts - copy, cut, paste, etc... if mouse movements were faster, why would the shortcuts even exist?

Re:that useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Story posted at 4.34, you post at 4.35 wondering if its useful.

Well *I* wonder if you've even tried it, I suspect not mr First Post.

Re:that useful?

[keiferb]

Right... but by that logic, because vi exists, there's absolutely no reason to use emacs, pico, or any of the other *ahem* full-figured editors... and we all know what the community thinks about -that-.

Re:that useful?

[thomas.galvin]

The mouse may be faster for some things, but for the usual text editing the people on this board probably do, the keyboard is the way to go.

A friend asked me to debug some of his java code the other night; I moved to the spot in the code where I needed to be, put in a few debug statements ( sout C-; turns into System.out.println()), saved, meta-tabbed to my compiler terminal, compiled, and ran the new code, all in a few of seconds, all without taking my hands from the keyboard. There is absolutly no way that I could have done that faster with a mouse.

I think the real speed advantage of a mouse is seen when the progarm uses a visual paradgym, or the people using the program are unfamiliar with it. Most of us have the important keystrokes burned into our heads already, so it is much easier for us to, say, hit C-a-n-v to copy a file, open a new buffer, and paste the file into that buffer, than it is to go to edit > select all then edit > copy then buffers > new then edit > paste.

Re:that useful?

[axxackall]

It doesn't work on my computer.

Any screenshot?

Re:that useful?

[Kashif Shaikh]

FYI: They use Circular/Pie style menus in Neverwinter Nights.

Personally I found what you said is true: It requires less linear searching, easy to spot things, and, don't have to move the mouse as much.

In Neverwinter Nights, Clicking on a "menu item" on the circular list reveal another deeper list. Right clicking would bring you back to the parent list.

IMO, it's not perfect but a step in the right direction.

Re:that useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Be more specific. For what kinds of tasks, and what kinds of users?

I do know that I can use keyboard shortcuts faster than selecting from drop down menus (difference is sometimes up to a second), but on the other hand, I can visually select areas of text faster with a mouse.

Re:that useful?

[DGolden]

A static screenshot just looks like a normal non-pie popup menu, so there's not much point, and animating it doesn't give a good impression of how it feels, since a large part of it is making sure the menus move at exactly the speed of the normal pointer behaviour, to preserve contiuity and not jar the user.

Relative to the stationary physical screen, the menus move and the pointer stays still (with the net effect the pointer is moving relative to the menus, but stays in the same place relative to the layer under the menus.).

Combined with pie menus, it could be nicer. Flying-Pie-menus?

I've tested it with the sun 1.3.1 and 1.4.0_01 jvms on linux and windows - it depends on the awt robot class to fake the mouse, so if you're using XFree your build must have the xtest extension (but almost all do) (use xdpyinfo to check what extensions you have.).

Re:that useful?

[axxackall]

I've got a grey color box when a terminal window was full of error messages about fonts not found

You've specified fonts - that's the shortest way to break portability of Java applications as every system has different available fonts and Java VM (remember a myth about java portability?) behaves in such situations differently on different platforms. I've tried it on Yellod Dog Linux v2.1 ("Grey" G4 box).

Re:that useful?

[DGolden]

Did you click on the grey box - that's all there is until you press a mouse button to display the menu :-)

The source is in the jar, placed into the public domain. No fonts are specified - Though a custom mouse pointer graphic of "invisible" is used, which is not necessarily supported on all platforms.

Let's get the obligatory Homer saying over with...

[Rude Turnip]

"Mmmmmmmmm...piemenu"

wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is definetly front page worthy news

Not a bad idea at all...

[coryboehne]

I'm amazed to see such innovation in Mozilla, (NOTE: This is not a bash!) It seems to me that most of this type of major change tending to make it prettier and eaiser to computer has come from apple (read macintosh), I'm a PC diehard and always will be, and it's really nice to see a QUALITY product like Mozilla getting even better with the addition of features like this...

Re:Not a bad idea at all...

[MisterBlister]

Pie menus have been around since at least 1991. Not to bash Mozilla, this is a nice option, but they are hardly innovating here.

Re:Not a bad idea at all...

[krogoth]

Actually, this is a bit of an innovation - the only other place I've seen these in a desktop application is Maya.

Re:Not a bad idea at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so what you're saying is:

When MS borrows an idea it's plagiatrism, when the free software movement does the same it's innovation?

Hehehe.

Thank god I'm a BSD user; who simply can ignore to the politic of the rest of the world.

Re:Not a bad idea at all...

[Huge Pi Removal]

Yes, and Maya is for serious professionals who *know* how to use a computer.

Seriously, all those tiny little icons, most of which have no immediately obvious meaning. It's hardly grandmother-friendly, is it? Or is that not the point?

Re:Not a bad idea at all...

[rseuhs]

The "Grandmother friendly" and "Can Joe Sixpack use it" - disease is making it to slashdot.

Just because your grandmother can't use it, doesn't make it useless.

Keep the defaults simple but allow users to use advanced options.

Best implementation of pie menus

[iocat]

I've seen was in Return to Zork back in 1994. Super cool. Anyone else have any good examples of pie menus? We're considering using them in a game and seeing more would be neat.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[mad_cow]

Actually I think that Slashdot had a link to an article about this kind of interface a while back, talking about its use in the Sims. There were even some examples of pie menus in JavaScript that you could goof around with in your browser.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Russellkhan]

If I'm understanding the concept correctly, (The links are already slashdotted) they were also used in The Curse of Monkey Island, one of Lucasarts' excellent graphical adventure games.

Russ

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[reduced]

Also the biker game. Ah, what was the name of it?

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to remember Star Trek: Birth of a Federation used something like a pie-menu, although it was oval in shape.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[nathana]

I always thought that Silver's pie-menus were rather intuitive to use...

I didn't care for those sample JavaScript pie-menus from the piemenu.com website linked to in this article. They were kinda frustrating to use since it wasn't visually obvious where the border for one option ended and the other began.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[esper_child]

full throttle was the game I beleive.

The Longest Journey had them too.

The only place I really see pie menues in games is in the Adventure games, the sims did obviously as well.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[ArnoldYabenson]

(The links are already slashdotted)

I thought so too, then I tried loading the page in Mozilla. (Remember when Bill Gates used to lock out Netscape now and then?) Loaded slow, but loaded and I now have pie menus!

Here's some relevant links that still seem to load rapidly: Developer's home page

Screenshots of the menus with a key to their functions.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Anonymous Coward]

Neverwinter Nights, anyone?????????????

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[global_diffusion]

Anyone else have any good examples of pie menus?

The desktop-ish thing I use for my system has pie menus. They are actually very good. Check out further. You have to get it from cvs, but it's rather fun. It's an animated-ish desktop-ish thing based on the evas libs. I'd give you a screenshot, but I don't have anywhere to put it. It uses pie-menus for frequently used programs (at least that's the way I set it up).

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[khuber]

Planscape: Torment uses pie menus. It took a while to get used to, especially since it's iconic, but then it worked fine.

planescape screen

-Kevin

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Ilgaz]

Er, Webwheel (Logitech mouse driver in windows) could be a good example.

Here is an example. http://www.gamesurge.com/pc/mouse/webwheel.jpg

Its there for 1-2 years but I don't use it.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Lilior]

Quest64, also uses pie menus, although they all only have 4 choices, and its not a mouse interface. N64 game, not particularly great for its genre, but wasn't too bad either.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Anonymous Coward]

Neverwinter Nights has them, too bad its not out for linux yet.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

Neverwinter Night has pie menus almost exclusively.

Not a bad implementation, but i'd still like to see something cleaner.. it's a lot of mouse travel to use a pie menu.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[cymantic]

It may not be the best, but it does work in Mozilla (and IE) in pure dhtml....

it's still kind of in progress, (but I don't get a lot of time to work on it),

have a look here http://www.beatthesystem.co.uk/

tell me what you think.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Anonymous Coward]

Secret of Mana on the Super Nintendo, released November 1993. They weren't exactly the same, more of a "ring menu", but they were the earliest round menus I'd ever seen. The one from The Sims looks very similar, as I'm sure most pie menus do. I'm hoping these get added to MacOS X soon... :D

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't work for me. All the rectangles (aren't they supposed to be big pie-shaped wedges, anyway?) just overlapped, one on top of the other. This is in IE6 on Windows 98, BTW.

Just tried it in Mozilla 1.0. Works great, although the rectangles are a little small and hard to click on (especially the image links).

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Enrico Pulatzo]

Not quite sure if it's the same thing, but Final Fantasy 3 (USA) had them. Kinda. It was an option to turn on in the game to make the menus simpler to use, and sped up combat somewhat. Handy.

Re:Best implementation of pie menus

[Matty_]

If that is a pie menu, then it is what they also use in Neverwinter Nights.

The Problem with Pie Menus

[duck_prime]

... Don't they only work well with Apples?

Maybe with ice cream on the side...

Re:The Problem with Pie Menus

[Pig Hogger]

I guess they are called "pi" menus, due to their round nature and 3,1415926535...

Re:The Problem with Pie Menus

[cicatrix1]

8979323846

Re:The Problem with Pie Menus

[SpaceHamster]

Actually, the pie menues DON'T work with Mozilla on OS X at all. You have to Ctrl+Click to simulate a right click, but the pie menu disables itself when the Ctrl key is pressed. *sigh*

Re:The Problem with Pie Menus

[robertchin]

It doesn't work anyway, even if you do have a three button mouse on OS X.

Re:that useful?-Pie High.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.piemenus.com/

Always a good place to go from the guy who's been advocating them for years.

On the menu

[Macrobat]

And for dessert:

• Apple
• Blueberry
• Pumpkin
• Pecan
• Hair

Okay, enough puerile humor for one day...

Re:On the menu

[MagnaMark]

Excuse me, but don't you mean enough pierile humor?

Options list

[T-Kir]

Select one from the following (thinking of the Sims, but we'll call GeekSims(TM)

- Order Pizza

- Fall asleep at computer desk

- /. another site into oblivion.

- Get the geek community to ping -f M$

Any other options are welcome.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

website

[khold]

In my Cisco Networking Highschool class everyone had to make a school website. I didn't know (and still don't but thats another story) anything about HTML, so I borrowed a friend's HTML book and thought that I could make a neat page using a javascript image map. The homepage of my website was a giant pie chart with cheerful looking colorful pie slices, each slice went to a separate section of my site. It looked pretty stupid actually, but at the time I felt special because I had programmed all of the HTML in by hand.

Re:website

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a COOKIE for you.
(har har)

Re:website

[Anonymous Coward]

really good story you faggot.

Re:website

[BitHive]

Isn't learning fun? Seriously. Regimented curriculums suck.

wow

[SlugLord]

These pie menus are really irritating... I guess it could be useful and would reduce the distance the mouse would have to travel, but I can't imagine why anyone would actually use these.

That being said, yay for Mozilla. A browser that actually runs without a 50 MB footprint and supports actual standards. That and you can get all kinds of silly do-dads on them like pie menus. (Yeah, I just glanced at pie menus briefly so maybe I've missed some really useful part of pie menus.

On the other hand, mouse gestures could be really useful, assuming you didn't accidentally use them when you didn't want to.

Re:wow

[mike_sucks]

"I can't imagine why anyone would actually use these."

Because pie-menus rock my world! ;)

Ever played Neverwinter Nights? How about The Sims? The pie menus in those games allowed for a clean, straight-forward user interface. The great thing about pie menus is that you can get to a lot of different options in a fast, easy, simple to remember, low click manner.

Fantatsic stuff.

/mike.

Re:wow

[leviramsey]

That being said, yay for Mozilla. A browser that actually runs without a 50 MB footprint and supports actual standards. That and you can get all kinds of silly do-dads on them like pie menus. (Yeah, I just glanced at pie menus briefly so maybe I've missed some really useful part of pie menus.

This is the obligatory Opera advocacy post.

Opera supports the same standards Mozilla supports, and definitely fits in a footprint smaller than 50MB, with mouse gesture support.

Re:wow

[Elbereth]

I'm a couple months from hitting 30, and I've had bad eyesight since forever. I almost went blind in one of my eyes when I was five. Perhaps because of this, my hand/eye coordination isn't so hot. This means that having oversized buttons or selection areas really makes my life a lot easier.

I can't really say that I find pie menus to be revolutionary or fantasically useful, but they are a million times better than the eight point font text links that I have to click on all the time. Luckily, Mozilla grabbed a Konqueror feature that allows you to override the minimum font size on a page. Right now, I have it set really high, but it's still a pain in the ass.

One day, you too will have bad eyesight, even if it takes another 20-30 years for you to experience the annoyances that I'm facing. I don't think you'll really appreciate alternative user interfaces until then. I know I didn't, back when I could sit down at my computer without wearing glasses.

Anyways, if we can dumb down user interfaces enough so that everything is self-evident, it will help more people get involved with computers. My six year old nephew gets confused rather easily when he sees too many options available to him. If he could browse the web as easily as he reads a book, I bet he'd be taking high school courses by the time he was ten.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! And Opera isn't free like Mozilla! And crashes a lot more than Mozilla on every computer I have ever tried it on! And sucks to boot! Go Opera!

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're a fag! I hope AIDS cures you of your homosexuality!

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

less than 50 MB footprint my sweet black ass!!

Re:wow

[ArnoldYabenson]

I used to work tech support, and I would gladly help all you far-sighted geezers with your font sizes. We would refer to you as "magoos." (No offense meant, I'm near-sighted myself.) Overruling type sizes is not a Konqueror "innovation." They just put it where the Magoos could find it.

You've always been able to override specified font sizes -- since Mosaic, if I recall rightly. In Internet Explorer, try the "Accessibility" button in Internet Options. You can even specify a "style sheet" file that not only specifies font size but color (no more ochre-on-brown!) and other design niceties.

Microsoft has sample style sheets for the vision impaired that you can easily modify to your tastes or use as is.

(Moderators: go ahead and ding me as off-topic. I'll still have the satisfaction of helping out one more "magoo.")

Re:wow

[willfe]

Woah there :) Nobody bashed the folks with bad eyesight :)

Hell, even with 20/20 vision I keep things in a fairly large font size on a 21" monitor. I *hate* trying to read small text. You're exactly right in that it's horrible in these gigantic menus with dozens of items in them.

Thankfully there are things that can be done to fix this in most applications. Mozilla, for instance, respects your user preferences set in the GNOME control panel. Its minimum font size feature is good for web pages whose designers thought "it looks great on my 21 incher, so it must look good even on those cheap 15 inchers!".

You're also exactly right that this is a step in the right direction. It's a beta release -- these guys were undoubtedly just curious to see if it would even work at all. Now that it's proven to be functional, folks can start focusing on the usability issues. Bigger icons for people (like you) with poorer eyesight than "average", different levels of "complexity" for different users (four or eight directions for novices, maybe sixteen directions for foolish persons ;), and tweaks for what options live where, and how "deep" in the pie they're positioned.

Re:wow

[unapersson]

Not yet it doesn't. That's why they've done a rewrite of the rendering engine (for easier DOM compliance).

Mozilla also supports MathML.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

..mozilla also has the neat feature of the
'mouse wheel' support.....which is fully
programmable in the preferences...and allows
you to alter the size of fonts on a page simply by
using the mouse scoll wheel.

you can also set it up to move back/forward, scroll
page up/down etc etc etc

its all there to be used....no more 'default font' settings are needed :-)

Re:wow

[phaze3000]

This is the obligatory Free software advocate's post.

Opera is non-free. Mozilla is.

Re:wow

[thesolo]

Opera supports the same standards Mozilla supports, and definitely fits in a footprint smaller than 50MB, with mouse gesture support.

While it is true that Opera tries to support the W3C DOM, the Opera engine does not do it nearly as well as Mozilla. Opera also has a weird interpretation of Javascript, making some sites which work in Moz choke in Opera.

Mozilla's support of CSS is unparalleled, I prefer Moz's mouse gestures to Opera, and Mozilla's smart popup-blocking (block only popups which I *didnt* request) is a million times better than blocking all or no popups. Also, since Mozilla doesn't allow switching user-agents in the GUI, it shows up as Mozilla in web logs, not as IE or something else. (I really dislike User-Agent spoofing, especially since it falsely increases IE's percentage of use.)

That said, if there were no Mozilla, I'd be using Opera; it is a sweet, small, fast browser and a joy to use. And while I don't like MDI in a web browser, it's still better to use than IE or Konqueror.

Re:wow

[Jeppe Salvesen]

There will be a surprise Opera 7 out this late fall/winter. It will offer full DOM support, along with niceties and speedups. At least, that's the rumor on some Norwegian websites (Opera is primarily designed and produced in Norway, AFAIK). Can't give ya an english link, yet, though.

I still root for Moz, though. Open Source and all that.

Re:wow

[fishbowl]

NWN does implement some good interface ideas,
but this is not what I would call a "pie menu."

What I want to see in a pie menu is something like this:

A menu comprised of slices, where if the program
designer wants to encourage the use of a specific
function, that slice is larger and/or a lighter
color. Or if a user tends to use a menu option more,
that slice can dynamically grow larger. That way
you can establish defaults (let's say 50% of the
menu), or you can have an adaptive menu that adjusts
to the users actual usage pattern over time.

The current logitech mouse driver has the closest
thing I've seen to this type of implementation.
I wish I could dig up the Byte and DDJ articles
about pie menus from days gone by.

Re:wow

[wilhelm]

These pie menus are really irritating... [snip] On the other hand, mouse gestures could be really useful

The bonus of pie menus, which nobody seems to have picked up on yet in this discussion, is that once you learn the pie menus, they become a gestural interface. Read some of Don Hopkins' descriptions, and you'll note that the menu is supposed to not pop up immediately, but have a little lag. There is also the ability to "mark ahead", which will allow you to goto a menu selection and activate it before it even shows up. With nested menus, you should be able to mark ahead more than one step, and make the selection you want, without having to even see any of the menus. Voila, a gestural interface.

Re:wow

[SimHacker]

Here's the DDJ article I wrote about pie menus in 1991: http://www.piemenu.com/DDJPieMenuArticle.html.

Adaptive user interfaces have their own problems: instability, unpredictability, violating the principle of least astonishment.

Generally it's not a good idea to change user interface properties like the slice width, direction or order out from under the user, because that interferes with the training effect of muscle memory. It's much more important that the user be able to learn the menus and mouse-ahead reliably, than having menus automatically adapt to the user's usage patterns.

Computers are notoriously stupid and often make the wrong decisions about adapting, introducing changes that hurt more than they help. Adaptability is really an AI problem.

Certain directions (the primary ones up/down/left/right, depending on the input device and handedness of the user) are easier to select than others (like the diagonals). So it's a good idea for the menu designer to use those for the most important items. But it depends heavily on the meanings and functions of them items and the usage patterns of the users. And the computer is incapable of making such high level decisions and aesthetic judgement calls.

Giving the user the ability to easily edit the menus themselves is a much more reasonable approach than automatically and unpredictably rearranging the menu behind the scenes without the consent of the user (the so called "adaptive" approach).

-Don

Re:The Problem with Pie Menus-Fly high.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey at least we know it's not a "Pie in the Sky" idea.

Google agrees with you

[Anonymous Coward]

A Google search for "pie menus" returns the directory category:
Home > Cooking > Tailgating and Picnics

Mozilla has mouse gestures?

[Longinus]

Ha, if I had known that, I could have switched from Opera already! I truly love that browser, but I would always prefer to use a free software solution instead of a proprietary one.

Re:Mozilla has mouse gestures?

[welshsocialist]

Don't waste your time.

The gestures are pretty awkward compared to Opera and appear to be rushed. I hope they improve in the future.

hahahaha

[reduced]

Between this and the wheel mouse maybe I'll never run off mouse pad again without shelling out cash for an optical mouse or turning up the pointer speed.

Waste of time

[ToasterTester]

People have been trying to find a use for pie menus for over a decade and still haven't. I first saw it tried back in the late 80's on a Mac. I saw it tried again in the early 90's on Windows. All it proved to be is a nice programming challenge. Now they popup again. The example using it in a game has kind of a lame cuteness factor, but that's it. Something for a graphic game.

Re:Waste of time

[Ilgaz]

Use of them in worlds best selling PC game ever (The Sims) isn't enough for you?

Oh btw, every windows logitech mouse user has them, as you can see http://www.gamesurge.com/pc/mouse/webwheel.jpg

Some like it, some not (me too, on webwheel) but definately not a thing not having a use.

Re:Waste of time

[snake_dad]

I assume that you also have no use for mouse gestures. Because that is really what this is. It's mousegestures, with a GUI tool to help you remember which gesture does what. It is one of the greatest features that can be added to Mozilla, IMHO.

Re:Waste of time

[mkaiser]

> People have been trying to find a use for pie
> menus for over a decade and still haven't.

Have you ever tried Maya/Alias Wavefront?
It's offering a variant of pie menus for a couple of years and many CG-artists do really love them.

Re:Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

The first time I saw pie menus was in a paint
program at the University of Waterloo in 1984!

No pie for me

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the worst UI "enhancement" I think I have ever seen in my life [next to MS Bob]. What could possibly be the purpose for this? It certainly isn't very logical, which is usually the basis for most menus. This is just useless cruft which adds to the already bloated mozilla.

If these catch on...

[I Love this Company!]

...people will right click more often, then maybe we'll see some backlash against then the eventual death of those stupid "RIGHT CLICK IZ DISABLED BCUZ J00 GUYZ STEEL MY PIX!" javascripts. Half the sites that use those are by people who stole content from other sites anyway. Anyway, if you're using Mozilla that shouldn't be a problem to disable.

Re:If these catch on...

[esper_child]

not to mention you can just VIEW SOURCE and just find the link to the picture in there and copy|paste it into your address bar then save the picture. :)

now what was the point of disabling my right click again? oh yeah, to piss me off.

Re:If these catch on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bleah. Just disable javascript. IMO, if you're browsing a site with lame javascript such as this, you are probably also in need re-evaluating exactly why you are.

Re:If these catch on...

[wadetemp]

Unless they block blank referers, which will once again cause all their pictures are belong to them.

Re:If these catch on...

[Dthoma]

"not to mention you can just VIEW SOURCE and just find the link to the picture in there and copy|paste it into your address bar then save the picture. :)"

not to mention you can fool these retarded scripts by just pressing the left and right buttons at the same time :)

Re:If these catch on...

[ArnoldYabenson]

Two words for you: Natalie Portman.

Re:If these catch on...

[XO]

...I had that problem with a site I really wanted to save a picture from (and it was a picture of myself!).. so I wrote a PHP script to download an entire site.

Re:If these catch on...

[XO]

well, the pie menus killed my PReferences menu, so I used that as an excuse to install 1.1b. Holy Sweet Jesus, 1.1b is MUCH faster than 1.0/1.1a. Oh my God.

Re:If these catch on...

[Anonymous Coward]

so I wrote a PHP script to download an entire site.

Whoo there, sparky! Didn't your mother teach you about wget -r?

Re:If these catch on...

[XO]

well, actually, when given a URL, it downloads all files referenced by IMG tags within the page. Not the entire page. Also has some basic options for only taking files that match certain patterns, and stuff like that.

Re:If these catch on...

[realgone]

<advocacy class="mac">
Unless you're using a Mac, in which case you can already just click and drag any old image you want out of the browser window. =)
</advocacy>

Re:If these catch on...

[SCHecklerX]

The OS/2 version of netscape was doing this back around 1996-1997.

It's easy to have objects from different programs all be used between programs when you have a real object oriented engine. I sure wish we had WPS for linux, and that programs were coded to it. Or at least have gnome and kde stop trying to mimic the idiocy that is the windoze interface and be more like os/2 was or taligent could have been.

Re:If these catch on...

[esper_child]

the ultimate tool for collecting porn, next step is to attach it to another script

helpful animation

[sc00p18]

For those who don't already know what a "pie menu" is, here is a nice animation that may be helpful.

Re:helpful animation

[Tablizer]

Here my favorite "pie menu" animation

Re:helpful animation

[Anne_Nonymous]

So it's just like a regular pull down menu, except its round instead of linear? BFD. Why not a menu shaped like an amoeba, or a polygon, or some other shape? What innovation am I missing here?

Re:helpful animation

[SCHecklerX]

Seems like a great way to give yourself the RSI that slashdotters love to complain about from time to time.

I prefer if I want to open a tab, for example.

and what about browsing on a device where a mouse is a pain in the ass? My libretto is run pretty exclusively by keyboard shortcuts because using the mouse isn't an option in most circumstances where I use the libretto.

Re:helpful animation

[blowhole]

Because it's a lot harder to click the wrong option when they're dispersed radially away from the cursor as opposed to one on top of the other in a list. Also, after a while you build a better muscle memory for selecting certain options whereas with a list it is still mostly a hunt and peck style used no matter how long you use it.

Re:helpful animation

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha!!

Cheers for that, forgot how funny that one was! I especially like the way he looks like Mr. Burns just after he gets hit with the pie, he's got the whole weak-armed, pathetic thing down to a tee! :)

Re:helpful animation

[scrytch]

and what about browsing on a device where a mouse is a pain in the ass? My libretto is run pretty exclusively by keyboard shortcuts because using the mouse isn't an option in most circumstances where I use the libretto.

In the case of the mozilla pie menus, the keyboard usage is unaffected on windows. Hitting the menu key will pop up the standard vertical menu, which is keyboard-navigable. The pie menu is unfortunately pretty lousy in windows with keyboard only -- there's no key to dismiss the damn thing for example. I just have it for the neato factor now.

With a mouse, it's reasonably ok, though I don't think it makes the selected item obvious enough (this is where apple's zooming icons would actually be very appropriate). Still, it's not great for a right-hander like me to try to flick the mouse northeast.

It just occurs to me what pansies we seem to be when talking about how hard it is to flick the mouse a particular direction. Then again, ergonomic principles go double and more for the guys hauling around power socket drivers on a car assembly line, so I suppose it pays to keep ergonomics in mind all the time...

Goodie...

[ChozSun]

... now I can use a browser as though I am playing NWN.

Mouse Gestures? -sheesh- Yea, that is called Opera, a superior browser.

Son of a gun. Why is it that other geeks want to shove the so-called greatness of Mozilla down my throat?!

Re:Goodie...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's shoving what down your throat? Hmm. Mozilla is a community project that many, many people work on by reporting bugs, verifying bugs, and fixing bugs. It is a community thing. Therefore releases of Mozilla and cool Mozilla stuff is covered by posts on Slashdot, because a lot of people care about it.

On the other hand, Opera is not a community effort, so I for one, and many others, don't care about it nearly as much. It's so nice that you like your web browser of choice, but nobody is shoving anything down your throat.

Re:Goodie...

[willfe]

Who shoved Mozilla's so-called greatness down your throat? You saw the article's introductory text, so why did you pursue it if you've already got your favorite browser hardcoded into your brain?

Re:Goodie...

[ChozSun]

The only thing that disturbs me about it is that it is so very slow compared to Opera and the lack of mouse gestures. If I was to use a slow browser, I would have sticked with IE.

Beyond Open Source, beyond community, beyond the-feel-good-software-of-the-year, why is Mozilla so great?

Personally, despite payware, nagware or freeware, I like using the best tool for the job. Opening all of my daily sites (/., ActiveWin, RootPrompt, ONLamp, evolt, The Onion, WWDN, ESPN, Neowin, etc.) with two menu clicks, mouse gestures, block pop-up windows (easily turned off, on or load in background), auto-fill-in for text boxes such as e-mail addy's, usernames, addys, etc., toggling images, cached images or no images with a button click, keyboard style navigation, "if you do not know how to make webpages, it will show it's true colors in Opera" and being fast as hell, Opera is the best browser for me.

I have tried Mozilla 0.9x all the way up to 1.0 release and was never impressed. I tried to like Mozilla and tried to share other geek's enthusiasm about this software. But in the end, I was still using Opera to do 98% of all my surfing (IE, Netscrape and Mozilla used to check my HTML/CSS/PHP).

Re:Goodie...

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL/Time/Warner perhaps? Mozilla is a community effort, lead by the interests of the third or fourth most evil megalocorperation on the planet. Opera is coded by a very small set of engineers who take pride in the code they produce.
Mozilla has it's own license agreement because the interests of netscape and now aol/time/warner are that none of the time their own in-house developers spend is wasted powering a 'competitor's browser.
Netscape went open source for a number of reasons, but mainly because they didn't have the resources to fight microsoft for the browser market. That being said, mozilla is entirely under the direction and control of aol-time-warner. They decide which features to add to releases, and which bugs to assign in-house developers to. In house developers approve any patches submitted, too, so if a patch fixed soemthing AOL wanted broken, concievably it could be rejected. However, since the source is there, anyone who needs a bug fixed can fix it on their own systems at least, but the majority of the up-to-date work will always be with the main project.
Mozilla is proof that you can't expect open-source to resolve internal issues. Netscape couldn't keep up, and even with thousands of volunteers they keep pushing back milestones.
However, mozilla is also proof that a company can use open source, without loosing anything you wouldn't have lost in the first place.
Open source projects are like any software, it's the people who are controlling it that determines what you can get from the community.

Re:Goodie...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Opera is not a community effort"

You are apparently not aware of the fact that Opera is a browser which evolves depending on what the users want. Users also actively report bugs, give feedback and discuss things. Their newsgroups are very active. The Opera community is great.

Re:Goodie...

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever works for you is great. congrats. but you didn't answer willfe...

Pie-nis in Mozilla?

[mrscorpio]

Did anyone else think that the subject is what the title of this article was? Say it with a long e *snickers*

Shit, I need to go to bed.

Chris

Very old concept

[ajiva]

This is a very old concept, I saw a demo of this on tape done in the 70s!

Maya's pie menus

[ecarlson]

Alias/Wavefront's Maya has some advanced pie menus, and they suposedly make using the program a lot faster, especially once you know the movements by heart.

I saw them demonstrated, and they were pretty impressive (the menus and the application).

Open source bakers unite!

[Anonymous Coward]

And make us some piemenus from the GNU's Cookbook!

Re:ATTENTION MODERATORS

[coryboehne]

And you sir? Surely realize that I'm very serious, and I'm most happy to see this. Your interpretation of my post as a troll only shows your underlying mentality of assumption that everything is sarcastic.

Great!!!

[friedmud]

After surfing with this for just the past 10 minutes I can already tell that it is a feature that I will not be able to surf without ever again.

It is EMENSELY powerful when you combine it with tabs. Using it to close tabs and surf back and forth through tabs is a breeze and really saves on the mouse wrist gemnastics.

This is a great tool! Thanks mozilla!

Derek

Re:Great!!!

[extrasolar]

Mouse? There is no mouse.

Re:Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

...la la la...

The spelling fairy floats toward you and you wince as she whacks you over the head with her wand... but suddenly you realize how to spell "immensely."

The spelling fairy floats off into the distance, singing.

...la la la...

Re:Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabs are stupid... let the window manager manage the windows, that's what it's there for.

Re:Great!!!

[ArnoldYabenson]

You missed "gemnastics." And I thought fairies were infallible like the Pope.

Re:Great!!!

[Spelling Fairy]

...la la la...

The spelling fairy floats toward you and you wince as she whacks you over the head with her wand... but suddenly you realize how to spell "gymnastics."

The spelling fairy floats off into the distance, singing.

...la la la...

Re:Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

...la la la...

The spelling fairy's supervisor (who was monitoring the fairy's work for training and accuracy purposes) floats towards the fairy and asks why she didnt pick up the shocking spelling of 'immensely'.

No raise for _that_ fairy at her next appraisal.

...la la la...

(PS, you may not have noticed but that there are plenty of people who post to Slashdot who speak something other than English as their primary language. Now you obviously figured out what the parent poster was getting it, so why bother with the spelling correction?)

Re:Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

fairy
n. pl. fairies
1. A tiny imaginary being in human form, depicted as clever, mischievous, and possessing magical powers.
2. Offensive Slang. Used as a disparaging term for a homosexual man.

Re:Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

(PS, you may not have noticed but that there are plenty of people who post to Slashdot who speak something other than English as their primary language. Now you obviously figured out what the parent poster was getting it, so why bother with the spelling correction?)

When speaking a foreign language I'd rather the native speakers correct me so that I can improve than if they just keep quiet about my mistakes. I guess you'd rather remain in ignorance but not everyone would.

Re:Great!!!

[CProgrammer98]

Tabs are great, all in one window, not clutering up my desktop or my taskbar...

Re:Great!!!

[DGolden]

But I've yet to see a X Window system window manager that wasn't "only tabs" or "only ordinary windows". AFAIK KDE kwin and perhaps sawfish and some others can do Be-style title tabs - but the windows don't group together without laboriously grouping them, the tabs just keep the titles visible. I'd like to just drag arbitrary windows into and out of tabsets that move as a unit. The X Window System is certainly flexible enough to allow this to be written - but I don't have the time right now...

Re:Great!!!

[Bishop]

I used to agree with you 100%. But after seeing several people swoon over tabbed browseing I decided to force myself to use tabs for a week to see what I was missing. Tabs rock. Try them out for a while.

Specifically try: load links in backrgound, bind middle click or control click to open new tab.

Re:Great!!!

[ecarlson]

Are you using pie menus or gestures? It sounds like you are using gestures, because the pie menu doesn't seem to make it any easier to switch between tabs. It seems to me that is still easier to click on a different tab than to use the pie menu to switch tabs.

Re:Great!!!

[friedmud]

Pie menus do make it easier to navigate tabs.

Just right click (and hold) and drag diagnally up/right. Now you have 4 new options which correspond to most the things you want to do with tabbed windows...

Up = New Tab
Right = Next Tab
Down = Close Tab
Left = Last Tab (Tab to the left)

I find this very quick and easy to use.

Derek

Re:Great!!!

[friedmud]

LOL!!!

Alright guys you got me! Cut me a little slack though - it was around 2am here when I made that post.

Reading it now, I can't believe I made those errors. But you know what? It happens...

Ok - move along now - nothing to see here....

Derek

Re:Great!!!

[ecarlson]

I know, I tried it, but I have to right click, then drag up diagonally to the right, then drag left or right, instead of just clicking on a tab. And what if I wanted to go over two tabs, I'd have to do that all twice.

I suppose it would get easier if I did it a lot, but it's pretty simple to click a tab, no draging involved. And it's also quicker to use the keyboard shortcuts, but you have to memorize them, and the only one I've memorized is ^T for New Tab.

Re:Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

...la la la...

The spelling fairy floats toward you and you wince as she whacks you over the head with her wand... but suddenly you realize how to spell "inconvenience."

The spelling fairy floats off into the distance, singing.

...la la la...

Re:Great!!!

[SCHecklerX]

Try it with a laptop eraser-head pointer and tell me how much you still like it.

Re:Great!!!

[angst_ridden_hipster]

And, in Mozilla, the ability to bookmark a collection of tabs is just f*king cool.

Want an entire reference library from a single bookmark?

Want to compare a bunch of arbitrary things?

Want to load up all your favorite news sites at once?

Re:Great!!!

[Theom]

You can't make all programs with the same UI. It doesn't works.

Re:Great!!!

[friedmud]

Well, I would except I stay as far away from those machines as possible ;-)

My laptop has a touchpad and I wouldn't want it any other way.

That said, I think this would be better for an eraserpoint user to use than having to go all the way up to the top of the screen and slap a button - all the person has to do is right click and then move a little left or right and then click again... Not that bad....

But like I said I don't use one so I can't speak as to how well it works. It sounds like you have one - why don't you let us in on how good/bad it is.

Derek

I don't think they were exactly pie menus

[EggplantMan]

But back in the day the SNES game Secret of Mana had a similar system that was more suited to controllers.

Re:I don't think they were exactly pie menus

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, SoM is exactly what this reminded me of

Re:I don't think they were exactly pie menus

[Anonymous Coward]

The SOM system was a major PITA to use. It was impossible not to overshoot over the thing you were trying to select. The only thing it had going for it is that it looked cool.

Re:I don't think they were exactly pie menus

[Anonymous Coward]

I faintly remember that...It looked similar, but the function was completely different (and traditional) -- the whole point of pie menus is that it allows you to select something quickly without looking at the options. Muscle memory and all that.

What was really cool about Secret of Mana was the two-player simultaneous cooperative mode. My brother and I got some good sibling bonding going on there.

Gee thanks

[bogie]

Those of us who test nightly builds are now not able to access the mozdev projects.

Slashdot really needs to start hosting its own mirrors for stories.

Re:Gee thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

You really need to start getting laid.

Re:Gee thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

f both of you. Neither of you gets any kind of regular pussy, even boy pussy. Quit being bitches.

Re:Gee thanks

[revery]

Yeah not being able to test for a day is worth whining about compared to the increased user base you probably just received.

Don't worry, the slashdot effect on your server usually wears off within 10-30 hours of initial posting depending on your bandwidth, but the effect of increased interest in your project might never abate.

slashdotting

[tabby]

How long before someone tries to sue slashdot for DDOS. Perhaps the default link to sites should point to the google cache (they are at least prepared for this sort of bandwidth). Or automatic caching of the site by slashdot - this would at least be responsible.

Re:slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

Things may have changed since then, but there once *was* a front page story which linked to google cache... It annihilated that individual cache server, although the content was still available on others. (I'm thinking it was a google.ca link)

MY MONOCLE!

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT FUNNY
<IMPOSTORoni> Don't quit your day job of being unemployed

Am I missing something?

[mosch]

Okay, maybe I'm just a complete and total idiot, but I didn't see anything about working piemenus for mozilla on that page. I saw piemenus for IE, and some ideas for plans for piemenus for mozilla, but no actual mozilla piemenuing code.

Is it just in the concept page, or can somebody point me at actual code?

Re:Am I missing something?

[tunah]

Try rightclicking inside the internal frame in mozilla, you should see a non-functional demo of the pie menus. If you click on the installation link on the menu in the iframe then it will install the xpi.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Kyro]

In the middle of the page there is a pretty frame, and on the left hand side _INSIDE_ that frame is an Install option. Just click on it, and restart your browser when prompted and you too can have pie-menus! hope this helps :-)

Re:Am I missing something?

[mosch]

thanks, I guess the 'complete and total idiot' option was the correct one!

Alias|Wavefront and MAX users will be pleased.

[catwh0re]

Pie like menus have been in use in Poweranimator (now Maya) from alias wavefront for years, 3d studio max copied the idea and too share a similar menu system. They seem to speed up productivity and are rather easy to explore.

A/W calls call them Marking Menus

[ecarlson]

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.

Excellent!

[nizo]

In my mind's eye I see an image of selecting an item from a newfangled animated menu, each time causing a little pie icon to fly across the screen and splat onto the Bill Gates image that appears randomly in the background. We certainly need more features like that in open source software (beats a talking paperclip anyway).

tooltips and text

[tabby]

needs option to have text labels in stead of icons or both at once as well as tooltips

Re:tooltips and text

[ArnoldYabenson]

If you 'linger' a beat, the labels appear a la MS "tooltips."

Re:tooltips and text

[tabby]

I know but that defeats any speed increase. I guess I want a training wheels mode with the labels and the icons by default. Its slower than a linear menu if you have to wait for tooltips. After a week or so I'll be used to it and turn the labels off, maybe or at least not need them anymore.

Re:tooltips and text

[Anonymous Coward]

Text only and text and icons are not slower, but faster: you do not have to guess what things do, you just read. And that is good for the first times and for the things you use rarely, it is just a scan with the eyes. Having to learn the meaning of 40 small icons is slow. Tooltips are slow too, cos you have to wait more than you take to read all the words. Also, text (supposing the coder does not decide to override...) follows your colours and size, so all looks integrated and you do not have problems derived of your eyes. Of course, you must be able to read. :)

Re:ATTENTION MODERATORS

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, let's see, an honest post, with no flamebait potential gets modded -1 flamebait, and then, an honest answer to a challenge as to the legitimacy of the comment, with enough courage to post under his/her account, without resorting to anon-coward (I've only used it here because it seems the mod's on this thread are bash happy and I don't want to lose karma). Now, is it just me or do the moderators seem to want to avoid real conversation? Either way, I would be interested to hear opinions as to whether or not the pie menus could be used for AI type interaction (smart menu choices).

Squeak has pie menus

[stephanruby]

I've been using pie menus on Squeak and they're pretty useful. In case anyone is interested, Squeak is a free and open OS and programming environment written in a version of SmallTalk-80.

Re:Squeak has pie menus

[extrasolar]

I've tried squeak at least twice in the past. I keep hearing on how good of a programming language / environment it is.

It is the most unusable environment I've ever used. I ran in on GNU/Linux. Dog slow. On Windows, its slightly better, but not by much.

Some Advice: avoid Squeak at all costs.

Re:Squeak has pie menus

[Ian Bicking]

Morphic has had speed problems for a long time -- I hear it's faster since I last used Squeak, but I have no idea how much faster. Squeak's strong anti-C bias may be hurting it here, because I imagine there could be some significant optimizations by coding more of the primitive graphical operations in C (or C-translated-from-Smalltalk).

However, Squeak didn't start with the Morphic widgets, and it should still have a "classic" environment. These widgets are much less general, much less fancy and interactive, but way faster. It's quite usable.

Morphic, IMHO, is cool but has very serious problems (lack of documentation and speed being the biggest). But you shouldn't disregard Squeak just because of it -- there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in it. (Probably not very practical for actual deployment of apps, though -- more of an experimentation platform)

Done In Other Apps

[Caraig]

The 3D modelling/rendering package Maya already has something akin to a radial menu, not only as a shortcut to the menu bar (when you hit SPACE) but also other options with the right mouse button. In theory, you can do *everything* with the mouse, without hitting more than the space bar now and then. Radial menus also help reduce wear and tear on those sensitive carpals.

This is an interesting development, and it'll be good to see how it develops. I think it just might take off, especially with TheSims and NWN both using radial menus.

Re:ATTENTION MODERATORS

[Anonymous Coward]

On another side thought, do the moderators understand that the flamebait rating should be used for comments that are trying to get people angry and pissed off? Obviously (to me) not the intention of the parent, and also the offtopic? This guy was trying to defend his post, and explaining that he was not trying to start a flame war with his comment... doesn't seem very offtopic to me... sometimes the mentality of moderators is very unusual....

Pie menu advantages

[uhlume]

As I understand it, the primary advantage of pie menus over standard linear/cascading menus is that they leverage muscle memory for enhanced speed and accuracy in menu selections. In essence, pie menus are not unlike a gestural control scheme with training wheels -- a series of selections from a cascading pie menu effectively forms a complete mouse-gesture, which can later be replicated without conscious reference to menu labels. This allows novice users to make selections cognitively by following menu selections, while more advanced users can simply remember the series of mouse movements required to reach a given selection.

More info here.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[wadetemp]

I don't know. Vertical menus leverage muscle memory as well, except that the movement is in a fixed direction with variable distance, rather in variable directions with fixed distance. I don't feel there's much difference between the two options.

But: pie menu navigation is not a fixed distance motion. The motions are actually more complex. For menus with more options, the target area must be farther from the centerpoint... 3 given menus with different numbers of options require 3x the number of types of movements because of the varying distances off center. On a vertical menu, the movement to get to the "first" menu option is the same for any length menu... and this is very powerful when the first option is also the most commonly selected.

It's my personal belief that pie menus are more of a perceived advantage rather than a true advantage. The complexity of motion makes you feel more industrious... although you may not be getting work done any faster at all.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[Ian Bicking]

Maybe you have better muscle memory than me, but I absolutely have no ability to automatically hit menu entries. If you think you can, then try it out: try to select "reload" from the context menu with your eyes shut. And without practicing -- you can remember any one distance by practicing, maybe any two, but menus are typically longer than two entries.

If you can't do it with your eyes shut, it isn't muscle memory. I have fantastic keyboard muscle memory, but even then it's clearly not distance memory. On a keyboard, I remember the hand positions -- because the base of my hand doesn't move as I touchtype, each key makes my finger curl to a different degree. When hitting keys that require me to move my hands -- function keys, for instance -- I have a great difficulty doing it without looking. After repetition, I can remember a small number of distances -- to the backspace key, for instance -- but it is very limited and requires constant reinforcement.

This all is true of mouse movements as well -- muscle memory for distance just sucks. How often do you make a mistake that you move your mouse in the wrong direction? The only time I've had that problem is with the iMac mice that were easy to hold sideways. How often do you move the mouse the wrong distance? I do that many times each day -- I went to edit this last sentence, and moved my mouse about two pixels below the text box, requiring a correction. Hell, I probably make those mistakes on at least 10% of my mousing -- though I suspect it's closer to 80%, when you consider that almost all mousing involves a large movement to the general area (which is inaccurate), and then a series of smaller corrections until you are within the target area.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[Anonymous Coward]

Pie menus also have the advantage that menu items are quicker to select, because you select by direction rather than distance.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[Joe Tie.]

If you think you can, then try it out: try to select "reload" from the context menu with your eyes shut.

If I wasn't sold on the pie menu already, I sure am now. I've been using this for about fifteen minutes and mozilla's normal menus since whenever the last time they moved the options around in there. With the pie menu I hit reload on the first try. Turning it off, first I couldn't even remember where reload was and the next try was three options off.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[oliverthered]

I totally agree,
Personally I would hate the idea of pie menus. My muscular control of my hands in a arbitrary angle is far less than in a vertical/horizontal movement.

I found it very dificuly(almost impossible at times) to get some of the gestures in black and white and the leash ended up getting detached half the time(most annoying during a fight)

Give the design of most things (several thousand years of design in some cases) it would appear that that is true of most people.

Pie menus also have a back tracking problem (unless you use semi pie menus)

Personally I prefer keyboard shortcuts which I can remember easily (just like a bit of music, alt+s, f) or (esc , esc , q , ! , return). or whatever.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[evilmrhenry]

Mice resist muscle memory for distance rather well.
The main reason is that most mice have acceleration features, which means that you would need to balance the starting location, the direction, the speed, and the distance in order to achieve the same level of accuracy you get with the keyboard.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[ecarlson]

Of course you can't hit regular menus with your eyes closed. That's why pie menus are so great. You can use pie menus with your eyes closed -- not that you would want to, but once you're used to pie menus, it removes they "eye" part from "eye-hand coordination".

Re:Pie menu advantages

[morie]

Damn! I got "View Source"

Re:Pie menu advantages

[Dixie_Flatline]

>If you can't do it with your eyes shut, it isn't muscle memory.

That's not STRICTLY true. I mean, I often typo when I'm typing, but that doesn't mean I don't have muscle memory for my keys. I'm a pretty reasonable touch typist.

Take this example, because I'm sure it's happened to you before: you have a drop down menu, and the item you want is normally the second option. You've been looking for it as the second option for years. When you drop the menu down, you have a fairly good idea of how much to move your pointing device down before you actually get to it. Now, if someone moves that item to the BOTTOM of the list, 5 or 6 spaces away, you're going to be hitting the second item on the list by accident a lot, and it'll take you a while to retrain yourself to not automatically go to the second item. Microsoft's system of 'hiding' things that you don't use often enough is strictly contrary to the concept of muscle memory, and anyone that's ever used a menu where their favorite item has suddenly changed positions will tell you that there's definitly a muscle memory factor present. Even the muscles in your EYES play a factor, since they automatically look in that certain spot for the thing that you're looking for.

The responses to your post are correct, too. A pie menu will train your muscles up better, I think. I rather think Neverwinter Nights did a good job on the radial menu deal. It's not quite a 'pie menu', but it's pretty close.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered that maybe this is due to a bad way of holding the mouse, or just due to a bad mouse plain and simple?

Re:Pie menu advantages

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo, poster was talking about *PIE* menus and muscle memory, *NOT* regular menus. I would smack you with my clue stick but it's in the shop.

Re:Pie menu advantages

[oliverthered]

No it's due to bad muscle control.
You should see the state of my handwriting!

UWM

[extrasolar]

I don't know if anyone remembers UWM which was (and still is) a cool X window manager that uses pie menus instead of pop-ups.

It doesn't seem to be in active development, but it is a rather minimal window manager so I doubt you'll have any problems using it.

It has some nice looking borders too.

Hmm...gives me memories. Downloading... :)

Re:UWM

[legis]

There is also the Pie Menu Window Manager. You can find it at:

http://www.crynwr.com/piewm/

Uhh ok.

[jeti]

1. I'm the author. And in half an hour I'll
go surfing the atlantic coast of france for
14 days. That's one of the reasons I didn't
announce the project more widely. I can't
give immedeate support.

2. You can find the home page of the project
at www.gamemakers.de/mozilla/radialcontext .
Mozilla users can test the feel of the menu
by just right-clicking. Other users can have
a look at the overview of the functionality.

3. I have implemented the menu so that it can
wander with the mouse. That makes it possible
to move the mouse _exactly_ like you would do
with mouse gestures.

4. I've been using the menu exclusively for
months. It works wonderful once you've gotten
used to it. But the menu seems to be extremely
confusing on first try. I'm still working on that.
Please sit down calmly and try it out for a
minute. Don't give up after 20 seconds. It's
worth it.

6. In case my poor server gets slashdotted:
You can check out the .xpi archive from the
optimoz CVS, which has a web interface.

Going surfin,
Jens

Re:Uhh ok.

[Hagmonk]

Mate, in 20 seconds I was addicted to this. It's just great. I can already do some basic navigation without needing to look at and read any menus - just move the mouse in the right pattern and away we go.

Future suggestions would be some sort of customisation, so you can choose what you want on your pie menu. And of course support for mail / news context menus too.

It looks really polished too. That's something a lot of open source hacks lack - polish. But IMHO it's the most crucial component to ensuring mass appeal. It's polished enough to give an immediate "oooh look at that" reaction. Brilliant, good work.

Re:Uhh ok.

[XO]

got it in, and whenever i right click, this pretty little graphic pops up, but no matter what i select from it all it does is select all the text in whatever frame i happen to be in.

Re:Uhh ok.

[Arandir]

I don't get it. I must be missing something obvious. To me it's just annoying. But I don't understand mouse gestures either, so maybe it's just me.

Re:Uhh ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's #5?

Re:Uhh ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

A mighty "screw you!" to the early announcer!

Mmmmmm 1.5 pie!

Re:Uhh ok.

[kcbrown]

I'm the author. And in half an hour I'll go surfing the atlantic coast of france for 14 days. That's one of the reasons I didn't announce the project more widely. I can't give immedeate support.

Sorry, but you can't do that. Now that everyone knows about your project you'll just have to cancel your vacation and support the project, just in case anything goes wrong!

Or, at least, that would probably be the case if this were a product written for your U.S.-based employer. Fortunately, this is a free software project so you shouldn't have that problem here. Enjoy your vacation dude -- sounds like you're going to have some great fun! Wish more people out there in the working world, at least here in the U.S., could do the same...

Re:Uhh ok.

[WWWWolf]

All right, I'd like to use this smallish opportunity to thank. Just what I had been waiting for (I liked the radial menus in NWN, and now some serious applications of the same thing in "real life"...)

One small bug I noticed with Moz 1.1b for Windows: If I use "open link in new tab", when I go back to the previous tab it thinks I'm selecting text with mouse. Not harmful, but a bit odd...

Oh, and enjoy the vacation while it lasts. I just hope there's no *serious* headache-causing bugs waiting for you to fix when you return =)

Re:Uhh ok.

[siphoncolder]

4. I've been using the menu exclusively for months. It works wonderful once you've gotten used to it. But the menu seems to be extremely confusing on first try. I'm still working on that. Please sit down calmly and try it out for a minute. Don't give up after 20 seconds. It's worth it.

Sir, I would like to laud you on your efforts to bring pie-menus into reality. As I understand it, the main advantage in using pie-menus has nothing to do with extra functionality or mouse-gesturing; it's simply the fact that if all your options are focused in a wheel around the cursor, it takes the same amount of time to click on each menu since they're all equally close to the cursor; this in turn increases usability & efficiency.

However, in regards to your 4th point, I have to agree with you totally. Pie menus are nothing new; in fact, the idea for them has been around for AGES. Various leaders in GUI development (think: Apple & MS) with user-focus groups have tried out pie menus on people, with exactly that complaint - while VERY efficient, they're just too confusing at first, and likely to frustrate new users. Most general users DO tend to give up within 20 seconds; others will just get frustrated & resist the change. People generally read in lines; it takes longer for the brain to process text that appears in non-standard forms.

I hope we all really enjoy these new pie-menus, but I wouldn't expect them to break out into the mainstream.

Re:Uhh ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I honestly was totally confused. Then I realized that you basically drag THROUGH the Window, tab, tasks and page to get the the actual "pie menu" that does stuff. It's easy and I think real cool.

Re:Uhh ok.

[geekoid]

"And in half an hour I'll
go surfing the atlantic coast of france for
14 days. "

well, that made this cube I'm sitting in seem smaller then usual...

Re:Let's get the obligatory Homer saying over with

[twiztidlojik]

Are you KIDDING? That's a Weebl and Bob quote!

mmmm piemenus!

PizzaTool

[SimHacker]

Here's a screen dump of PizzaTool, that ran on the Sun under the NeWS window system, and actually faxed a PostScript picture of the pizza (along with the text of the order) to Tony and Alba's pizzaria in Mountain View:

http://catalog.com/hopkins/images/pizzatool.gif

It was written entirely in NeWS PostScript, and shipped with OpenWindows 2.0 (but with the faxing option disabled).

Ironically enough pizzatool didn't use pie menus. (There were too darn many toppings to choose from, which wouldn't have worked well on a pie menu.)

-Don

Re:PizzaTool

[scrytch]

PizzaTool, eh? Written in OO PostScript, shows a full color preview of the pizza? I have a feeling this is derivative of burritotool, which was a much less "clever" app used at Sun, but sufficed to fax in orders for a local mexican restaurant. I learned of that app at sun, and found some documentation for it floating around in the internal network, but the mention doesn't appear to have escaped anywhere google can find it.

Re:PizzaTool

[SimHacker]

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

RTFFAQ

[Dthoma]

Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!

Read it and weep, you whining bitches!

Re:RTFFAQ

[benwb]

Given the reasons given in the faq there's no reason why slashdot couldn't link to google...

Re:RTFFAQ

[shess]

From the FAQ:

I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?

They can't even wait 6 seconds to check if the "news" is a repeat of something posted yesterday, how can you expect them to wait a couple hours to break news of this import! The universe might come unhinged!

Re:right-click disabling scripts

[tRoll with Butter]

I actually take the time to e-mail sellers (a prewritten form letter) on eBay to tell them how annoying that is. (I use the right-click menu's "Back" option almost exclusively to go back)

In a nutshell, the form letter just basically tells them to start IE (they're ALL using IE) and look at that nice little "Save As..." option in the file menu. I also mention that most people know about their "Temporary internet files folder".

Creme brulee menus in Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, it's just in the experimental dessert branch.

Re:Creme brulee menus in Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

actually pretty funny. way to go.

Ok, call me an idiot...

[cr0sh]

I have this installed currently on my Moz 1.0 install - and I want to uninstall it - does anyone have ANY idea how? I don't care if I have to edit some files - I just want to go back to the old method (I actually like this new system, but for some reason it has a bug that annoys me - you select an option on the ring, like "new tab", and when you return to the original tab, you are in "hightlight mode" where your mouse is highlighting everything - annoying).

Help?

Re:Ok, call me an idiot...

[Photon Ghoul]

Edit->Preferences->Advanced->RadialContext->Use radial menu

Re:Ok, call me an idiot...

[Anonymous Coward]

If that behaviour annoys you, use the right mouse button to select and not the left button. Or, better and faster, just keep the right mouse-button pressed and release when you have chosen.
But you are right, it is a bug and the programmer (who ran out of my room one minute ago to go surfing) knows it.
bye
Martin

Keyboard accelerators, mouse ahead and rehersal

[SimHacker]

Pie menus are better than linear menus with keyboard accelerators, because when you use a pie menu you're not familiar with, you're actually rehearsing the accelerated action.

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

Re:Keyboard accelerators, mouse ahead and rehersal

[wadetemp]

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.

It's good that I have two hands, then, so I can keep one on the keyboard. :)

Something that would make pie menus substantially more useable, IMHO, is a trackpoint type device mounted on top of the mouse. Although flinging your mouse rapidly 3 different directions makes you feel like you're getting lots of work accomplished, I would much rather click to select the item, then finger the 3 directions with a trackpoint. It would allow me to maintain the position of the mouse, rather than throwing it around the screen randomly all for the sake of choosing some options.

Re:Keyboard accelerators, mouse ahead and rehersal

[SimHacker]

I think I've actually seen a mouse like you describe, with a trackpoint on it.

Ted Selker is the IBM researcher [now at MIT Media Lab] who came up with the Trackpoint, after many years of research and development.

He called it the "Joy Button". But IBM they wouldn't go that far out with a product name. But he did get away with suggestting the slogan "So Hot We Had To Make It Red", which survived the focus groups and was printed in huge type on a two page spread ad for the Trackpoint in Time magazine.

Ted Selker even made a prototype Thinkpad with TWO trackpoints, one for each hand!!! Boy did that have a nice feel to it! Something not-very-subliminal about the appeal of a computer with two red nipples. People of all persuasions couldn't keep their hands off of it. It was one of those things that was just too good to release. I heard a rumor that IBM keeps the original prototype locked away in their secret underwater sealab, and they installed the only other pair of trackpoints on a laptop given as a gift to Bill Clinton, in exchange for special favors.

-Don

Re:Keyboard accelerators, mouse ahead and rehersal

[monkeydo]

Track point on a mouse:

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/user/tp/tpmouse.html

We actually have these on some IBM workstations. It works like a 2 axis wheel.

Double Trackpoint:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/user/tp/tpmouse.html

Re:Keyboard accelerators, mouse ahead and rehersal

[Anonymous Coward]

makes you wonder about the process Ted Selker uses to think up research ideas...

Re:Keyboard accelerators, mouse ahead and rehersal

[Theom]

"...rather than throwing it around the screen randomly all for the sake of choosing some options." Guess what they made the mouse for...

Whats all the hype?

[gomerbud]

I use my ten key pad all the time. I'd consider that the original pie menu. I think im a little biased however. I've used a mouse for the last ten years, and i still dont like it.

MODERATORS: Vocabulary lesson

[Scott Baio]

The parent psost is "informative," not "insightful."

Kind of like that one episode of "Joanie Loves Chachi" where the piano movers had to get in but joanie was having a bad hair day. Remember how surprised she was when they knocked on the door? She's all, "WHOOOOOO? WHAAA?" and I'm all "WHOAOAOA!"

Man, I miss acting.

Mod me as a troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

but someone has to say it.
Mozilla is a great browser, but it's damn big and slow. Even if I use the much lighter Galeon, the underlying Mozilla engine is still a bit too heavy.
Someone (Opera, Links) showed us that writing fast and small browsers isn't impossible at all.

IMO, what Mozilla really needs is:

1- Optimization. Stop adding new features for at least six months and srink the code as much as possible.

2- Completely rewrite the user interface.
The Netscape approach is old and way less functional than ..say the Opera or the Galeon one.

3- Rethink the installation process. The default installation and setup must -not- include the composer and the mail/news client. Tabbed browsing must be turned on by default, popups must be disabled by default (just put a reminder that alerts the user about that during the installation process).

Re:Mod me as a troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely. Mozilla's better than NS but when I had to go for a week using it instead of Galeon I almost choked. Heavy, and doesn't have anything approaching a snappy feel. Sometimes it's enough to be a problem, but most of the time it's just annoying to have to wait for my browser's UI. The *UI* for Christ's sake!

Re:Mod me as a troll...

[d2002xx]

Ya! If mozilla can rewrite its damned slow interface, I will take away my opera and turn to mozilla immediately!

What about the *serious* users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I surf a *LOT* - any word on the sty menus?

If You Don't Have Mozilla

[pnatural]

You can view some screenshots on this page.

Rather than looking at that page, you could always install mozilla and try out the menu yourself.

mmmm...pie!

[Tumbleweed]

http://www.weebl.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/b3ta/pie.htm l

Hey, if Weebl likes pie, you should, too!

Re:mmmm...pie!

[Bowdie]

When come back, install pie.

wanker

Evolution, not revolution.

[Anonymous Coward]

2- Completely rewrite the user interface.

Yeah- another rewrite, that's what Mozilla needs! ;)

There's no need for a rewrite. So much of the Mozilla interface is done on the fly from scripts - there's not much caching and there's absolutely no compilation of XUL. That'd improve the interface.

Integration issues and component technology

[SimHacker]

Actually, the old ActiveX pie menus do support XML configuration, but I didn't take it very far because it was obvious that you needed to be able to embed dynamic HTML in the XML pie menu specifications, to describe any kind of interface possible: pie menus with html, style sheets, animated gifs, flash, other plug-ins, svg, force feedback, odorama, or whatever the latest fad in rendering technology happens to be at the time.

But it just wasn't tractable to implemented dynamic html rendering in the ActiveX control. It might have been possible to recursively embed an Internet Explorer ActiveX control, but it just wasn't worth going down that road.

Instead I turned the problem inside-out and reimplemented pie menus inside Explorer in JavaScript (as an IE-Windows-only dynamic html behavior component), so they could take full advantage of all of the browser's features, in a well-integrated, memory-efficient way.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that Microsoft is going to support Dynamic HTML Behavior Components on the Mac version of Internet Explorer, and unlikely but not impossible that Mozilla will support them on any platform. It's a nice way to package and re-use components implemented in scripting languages like JavaScript or VBScript (or any other language).

I'm glad the Mozilla developers have implemented pie menus using their own component technology (Chrome). It would be nice if Mozilla could some day support DHTML components on all platforms (which would give it an advantage over IE), and also nice if IE could support Chrome components on all platforms. One of those scenarios is more likely than the other, though.

The JavaScript pie menus can't shape the window in arbitrary ways like the ActiveX pie menus do, because they're running inside of the browser window, without their own windows. But they're nicely integrated into the html rendering engine, so they can take advantage of all kinds of nice features like transparency, rendering parameterized Flash files, etc.

The pie menu tracking callbacks can change dynamic html properties as well as Flash object parameters, which works well because recent versions of Flash have been integrated with Internet Explorer's HTML renderer instead of being blocked off in its own window. So the browser can draw html content on top of flash content and vice-verce, and JavaScript pie menus can integrate them both.

I don't yet know how to Mozilla pie menus are integrated with the web page and drawing engine, but I trust they've done a good thing, and I'm looking forward to trying them it and learning how it works.

-Don

Re:Let's get the obligatory Homer saying over with

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the correct quote would be:

mmmmm....floor piemenus!

Yep, I'm an idiot...

[cr0sh]

Thank you! I could have sworn there wasn't anything there before, but I am glad you posted this - still, I would love to remove it completely - the crazy thing is I just read the "about.txt" file in the chrome install area - and it says there to "please make a backup of your chrome subdir" - gee, thanks for telling me after the fact (not griping at you, but the developer). I am wondering if I am going to have to rename my install area, then "fakie" install moz again, extract the chrome dir (for a virgin one), then delete the dir and rename the old one back, and put the new chrome over the old... Think this would work?

Re:Yep, I'm an idiot...

[MarkofT]

Use the right click to select and you won't hilight. You can also elect to use the middle mouse button. I think this will also allow you to not hilight.

Re:Yep, I'm an idiot...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong.

You can't even use left click with it!

This bug is a showstopper. Sorry.

Re:Yep, I'm an idiot...

[SubtleNuance]

your supposed to read about.txt (or whaterver other *.txt the hacker tars up for ya.. maybe README.txt) BEFORE installing...

Re:Yep, I'm an idiot...

[cr0sh]

Normally I would. However, the only thing that allows you to even get the item is either the homepage or the iFrame of the homepage. The only link that allows that is something called "Install RadialContext 1.0b1 (08/18/2002)" - there isn't a link anywhere I can see to download a .tar.gz file or similar file.

They don't post the README anywhere, and there is nothing on the site to indicate that you should backup your chrome directory - you don't get to see the README until after the fact.

I admit that I was stupid for trusting that it wasn't going to change things much - my mistake, and I will be extra careful in the future. Fortunately they provided a way to disable it (and it made me finally get my three button mouse working properly last night as well). Still, I don't consider myself a moron in these affairs - last week I got that Linux kernel driver for the PowerGlove compiled and working properly with my modded glove (yes, I soldered it myself back in 1993/94 and had it working with Rend386 under DOS on my 486 box) - I didn't blindly trust the source on that one, I read through it (it was only 5K or so), checked it out, verified that it wasn't doing anything hinky, then compiled and installed it - worked great. However, for that code I _could_ download it before install - I wasn't able to with this code.

If you know of a way I could have, that was referenced off the homepage or site somewhere, for a tar install or something, please point out my true idiocy - please!!!

Impossible to use in combination with...

[Elledan]

Standard features of Mozilla linked to mouse-actions (right-click, middle-click to open link in new tab, etc.) and mouse-gestures (using the right mouse-button).

Naturally, I couldn't set RadialContext to the left button, since I need that button to select text and click stuff.
The middle button couldn't be used because in that case I won't be able to open links in new tabs by clicking them with this button.
The right button couldn't be used because in that case it would interfere (practically disable) mouse-gestures.

I refuse to use modifier keys since that would nullify any advantages these pie-menus might have over the standard menu in regards to efficiency.

So in short, I installed RadialContext and discovered that it interfered or even rendered a number of standard and added (mouse-gestures) features of Mozilla unusable or made them much more cumbersome to use.

It's a nice idea, but needs some more thought in regards to its implementation.

Re:Impossible to use in combination with...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that these are mouse gestures, more or less, no?

Re:Impossible to use in combination with...

[AceMarkE]

I'd say it's more a factor of how you personalize Mozilla. I just swapped RadialContext over to my middle mouse button, since I don't use it when browsing. My preferred method for opening stuff in a new tab is right clicking, since it's the first item on the menu (so much so that it's now a conditioned reflex for every link I click on). So while there's probably room for improvements in RadialContext, overall it seems to be pretty decent in its current state.

But hey, that's why they call them preferences.

Mark Erikson

Re:Impossible to use in combination with...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you need to get a proper mouse? My cheapo logitech has 4 buttons and a wheel. Perhaps you only use ms windows?

It's all about the usability...

[altgrr]

As much as I hate to say it, the studies by Nielsen et al are actually worth something here. A context menu arranged in a circle will be easier to navigate, because you memorise direction as well as distance (look at the answer to q7 on the page).

Also, pie menus will be advantageous because, unlike keyboard shortcuts, they will be displayed whenever called upon. Further, arrangements such as piemenu-Left to go back, piemenu-Right to go forward, are intuitive.

Overall, this is a development in UI design that I'd like to see used more. I first saw it used in the extra software supplied with a Genius wheel mouse.

Re:It's all about the usability...

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh ? left for back and right for forward is intuitive ? For western people maybe...

Intuition comes from experience or common knowledge (which is learned actually) : something is intuitive because it looks like something else one has already experienced, or one is used to. Like reading from left to right make you think that right intuitively means forward.

Ok, I'm just quibbling...:)

Re:It's all about the usability...

[Anonymous Coward]

You may be just quibbling, but you have a valid point - I suspect that Chinese users of IE, for example, find alt-Left for Back most infuriating. Unless, that is, Chinese versions of IE have this feature changed around for their language. Who knows?

Re:It's all about the usability...

[SimHacker]

Well, since you specifically mention Nielson by name and nobody else, I should point out that Jakob Nielson has pretty much ignored pie menus and has very little to say about them on his web site, but for a brief mention in his CHI'88 trip report. Maybe he talks about them in some of his seminars, but I've never heard of him evangelizing the use of pie menus or developing products with them.

On the other hand, Gordon Kurtenbach and Bill Buxton have done a huge amount of valuable emperical research and commercial product development with pie menus, gesture recognition and other topics. They designed the Alias|Wavefront Maya user interface, so it's no surprise that it uses marking menus (which they call their gestural modifications to pie menus).

And of course Ben Shneiderman also talks about pie menus a lot, and writes about them in his books.

-Don

Re:It's all about the usability...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you're absolutely right on that one. Nielsen is a theorist, and doesn't actually do anything except write pretty crap-looking web pages.

However, the link in question is pointing to a site run by the Nielsen Norman group, so this is an indirect reference by his ilk to pie menus...

NWN!

[Jade E. 2]

That site fails to list what is probably the second most well known use of 'pie' menus, after the Sims. Neverwinter Nights! The context menus you use to do basically everything are radial.

That brings up another good point, which is that from what I've seen none of the radial menu implementations (Moz's or his javascript ones) implement hotkeys, which for a lot of users (read: me) immensely improves speed. I didn't like NWN's radial menus at all, especially since they have a 9th zone in the middle, which is the 'close menu' or 'go back' function. That meant that you had to move the mouse a significant ways towards each icon, eliminating a lot of the speed gain. Then I found out that the keys on the Number Pad were hotkeys for each of the 8 directions (with 5 being a hotkey for the center zone, and 0 being a hotkey to popup the radial for your character.) After that I loved them. Need your familiar? 0-4-1. Need rapid shot mode? 0-3-7-3. That saved all my quickslots for spells, potions, and other life-saving bits. I played most of that game with my right hand on the mouse and my left moving between asdf and the number pad.

Of course, I have no idea whether I'll ever find a 'real' use for being able to 10-key with the wrong hand, but you never know. :)

Re:NWN!

[jeti]

The RadialContext menu is a context menu.
You don`t have shortcuts on them because
the actions are not always available and
a mouse position is needed as reference.

The same is true for the NWN menu.

Pies Menus in Mozilla.

[cying]

You say that like it's a good thing. *shakes head*

Fish and Finger Pie!

[SimHacker]

The "Finger Pie" on handheld devices like the Palm is so fast and easy that no pen is required!

"As seen on Connected TV"!

-Don

Penny Lane's "Finger pie" was a Liverpudlian sexual reference included in the song to amuse the locals. "It was just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut," said Paul. "For months afterwards, girls serving in local chip shops had to put up with the requests for 'fish and finger pie'."

Marking Menus in use

[paulcurtis]

I used piemenus/marking menus heavily when they started off in Alias PowerAnimator. In that implementation there was a tiny delay between opening a menu and its display. It meant that as you became familiar with the gestures you wouldn't need to see a menu, because you'd selected something before it was displayed. This made everything so much faster and it's easy to learn 'memory muscle', like writing a signature, you just do it automatically without conciously thinking about it.

In that application it worked very well. Plus it was amusing confusing people who were trying to watch what you were doing.

paul

Re:right-click disabling scripts

[kesuki]

The funny thing about javascript is... once you disable it you can right click again. F12+e in opera to toggle javascript. Then again, you can always mouse gesture instead (rolling a click from the right button to left button.)

Neat idea

[endquotedotcom]

Now if only my iBook had a right mouse button.

Logitech had what sounds like the beginnings of this a while ago, but it was pretty annoying. I'm sure PieMenus is much nicer.

Re:ATTENTION MODERATORS

[Anonymous Coward]

yhbt.yhl.hand

Pie Menu Enhancements

[MyHair]

Now we can finally have tabbed pie menus!

And if there isn't enough room in the pie we can have coencentric choices!

(Remember how tabs started simple and then turned into multi-rowed or side scrolling stupidities?)

Regarding: the reasons given

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd reason that in the faq a reason is given why slashdot couldn't link to google given the reasons given in the faq.

Pie menus have been around since 1969

[SimHacker]

The first known published reference to the idea was in 1969, in a paper about a CAD system:

Wiseman, N. E., Lemke, H. U., and Hiles, J. O., "PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communications" ,Proc. 1969 CAD Conf. Southhampton, IEE Conf. Pub. 51, p. 463

The basic idea was also mentioned in an early edition of the reference book on computer graphics:

Newman, W.M. and Sproull, R. F., Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics, 2nd. edition, McGraw-Hill, 1979, 1973

Jack Callahan and I published a paper about an experiment comparing pie menus with linear menus in 1984:

Callahan, J., Hopkins, D., Weiser, M. & Shneiderman, B. (1988) An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus. Proceedings of CHI `88, 95-100

Pie menus have been used in products, including Connected TV, The Sims, Unix SimCity for TCL/Tk, Maya, Habitat, Neverwinter Nights, Return to Zork, Logitech's mouse driver, UniPress Emacs, and the open source piewm window manager for X11.

Pie menus have been implemented as plug-in components for systems including NeWS, Hypercard, ScriptX, X Toolkit, Director, Flash, Asymetrix ToolBook, TCL/Tk, ActiveX, Java, Dynamic HTML Behaviors, and finally Mozilla).

-Don

Re:Pie menus have been around since 1969

[Com2Kid]

Pie menus have been used in products, including Connected TV [connected.tv], The Sims, Unix SimCity for TCL/Tk, Maya, Habitat, Neverwinter Nights, Return to Zork, Logitech's mouse driver, UniPress Emacs, and the open source piewm window manager for X11.



And damn nearly half of the SNES RPGs ever made.

I always considered them damn annoying myself, but at least they where intuitive.

Re:Pie menus have been around since 1969

[crath]

Mouse Gestures (aka Gestural Commands, or Strokes) have also been around for many years; their inclusion in Opera, and now Mozilla, is wonderful and it is great to see this old idea finally gaining favour.

I first saw Strokes demonstrated in late 1986, in an AtariST-based 3D CAD product called JILCAD (written by Lee Hall). I don't know if Lee thought up the idea himself or whether he was implementing a feature he had seen elsewhere.

One neat JILCAD feature that I have never seen replicated elsewhere was the use of two cursors (with a right-click menu): the mouse cursor and a "placed cursor". Left clicking the mouse would position the "placed cursor" (to select a line or point, or to indicate a starting position) in the drawing plane. Moving the mouse to another position would indicate a second location(leaving the first cursor in place). The user would then right-click and choose a command off the menu---the right-click would cause a menu cursor to appear on the menu bar (a menu pallet, actually). For example, to find the midpoint between two points in the drawing: click on the first point, position the mouse cursor over the second point, right-click and select the find the midpoint function.

oops

[SimHacker]

Oops sorry! I meant 1988 not 1984:

"Jack Callahan and I published a paper about an experiment comparing pie menus with linear menus in 1988 (not 1984):

Callahan, J., Hopkins, D., Weiser, M. & Shneiderman, B. (1988) An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus. Proceedings of CHI `88, 95-100"

-Don

Steve Jobs thinks pie menus suck

[SimHacker]

Years ago at Educom, I gave a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES to Steve Jobs. He was jumping up and down, pointing at the screen, yelling "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat! That sucks!"

He had just finally released the NeXT computer. This was his big debut after such a long wait (remember the "NeVR" t-shirts?). The NeXT Computer had the best user interface in the whole world. All other user interfaces sucked in comparison. And the NeXT didn't have pie menus, therefore pie menus sucked. If you can follow that train of thought outside of the reality distortion field.

I gotta hand it to Jobs. Once he makes a decision, he sticks with it -- you gotta give him that. As far as I know, NeXT in its current incarnation as Mac OS/X still doesn't have pie menus.

-Don

Re:Steve Jobs thinks pie menus suck

[zapfie]

I don't know enough about operating systems to say, but would it be possible to make a library that overrode the NSMenuView and made it use pie menus instead?

Re:Steve Jobs thinks pie menus suck

[SimHacker]

Under the NeWS window system that I was demonstrating to Jobs, it was straightforward to replace the global default linear menu class with pie menus, so all applications used pie menus.

The challenge then is designing a pie menu component that doesn't suck, when you throw any old menu at it, without somebody redesigning each menu to work well as a pie.

One possible solution is user-editable menus, like Alias Maya supports. As far as I know, the NeXT and OS/X systems don't support allowing users to edit the user interface and menus at run-time, like HyperCard does for example.

For NeWS, I implemented a "SoftMenu" editable subclass of pie menus (that also could mix into linear menus), that enabled the user to edit, cut and paste menu items. But it was quite dangerous because you could really confuse things by pasting emacs commands into the terminal emulator, etc.

The HyperLook gui environment for NeWS supported fully editable user interfaces with pie menus at run-time, like HyperCard but with PostScript graphics and scripting, and a client/server architecture.

I used HyperLook to port SimCity to Unix, which used pie menus of course. Here's a deconstructionist screen snapshot of the SimCity user interface vandalized in edit mode.

Another possible solution is "smart" pie menu layout algorithms, user interface editors and wizards that automatically encourage or assist good user interface design (to whatever extent that is possible without annoying the user).

For example, the ActiveX pie menus can automatically raise the number of items to be even, limit the number of active items to 8, support scrolling, and reading order layout as well as circular layout. And you can optionally enable or disable any of those features through the property sheet. But the downside is that the property sheet looks like a 747 control panel.

-Don

Re:Steve Jobs thinks pie menus suck

[zapfie]

Is the NeWS window system freely available?

Re:Steve Jobs thinks pie menus suck

[SimHacker]

No, we tried to convince Sun to make it freely available for years before they finally canceled it, and lost the source code. I've still got a copy that runs on my old SparcStation 2, but unless somebody's created a good SparcStation 2 emulator that runs on Linux, you can only run it on a Sparc with an old version of the operating system.

There have been rumors from time to time about somebody trying to talk Sun into open-sourcing NeWS (and I send them a copy of my source code to help make that possible), but nothing has come of it. And there have been rumors of people planning on reimplementing NeWS from scratch, but don't hold your breath.

It would be much better to spend your time working on something new, since technology has advanced so much, and not many of the design desisions and tradeoffs made during the 1980's really apply any more.

I'm much happier with Python, SWIG, PyNumeric, Python Imaging Library, OpenGL, Zope, the XML libraries, and all the other great, free, well designed and supported Python modules that anyone can easily put together and easily do much more than NeWS ever dreamed of.

But if you really want to suffer needlessly from pointless complexity, backwards compatibility nightmares, and obsolete design compromises, you should just use Perl instead of trying to resurrect NeWS!

-Don

Ease of selection?

[fuzza]

I've never used pie menus, but they do look an interesting interface method...

I just hope that they are easier to select than the "line-based" menus in W9x/Gnome/KDE. Well OK, maybe the last ones aren't too bad (particularly Ximian Gnome is good) but I've often had trouble with the W9x menus - you put the cursor on your menu item, then by the time you move across to the resultant submenu, you've moved up/down far enough (before you hit the edge) that the next/previous menu comes out instead :(

It's probably just related to the abysmal text size in the aforementioned GUI. Or maybe I should just click to select the menu item instead...

Anyway, hopefully pie menus will resolve this problem by having a full 90 degrees to work with - much less ambiguity.

maya menus

[InsaneCreator]

This really reminds me of menus in Maya. But Maya's menus seem to be a bit more context sensitive and have text labels insted of small icons. It would be much better if the labels in mozilla were always visible and not only after a few seconds. Does anyone know what file should I edit to get that behaviour? I guess I would just have to change some "delay" value.

Re:maya menus

[jeti]

Try to replace the occurences of 900 in pieMenu.js with a smaller number.

Re:Marking Menus in use-feedback.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering how well pie-menus would work with feed-back devices like vibrating mice for example?

Poses problem with previous menus

[palad1]

still needs to integrate seamlessy with moz.
ie: binding it to the right mouse button will override the classivc popup menu [adios google search or 'view selection source'].
binding it to the mid mouse button: so long 'open link in a new tab'

Nice hack, but imo it really needs a lot of testing for a smooth integration with moz.

On the other hand...
Ooooh Shiny!!! ;p

Re:Poses problem with previous menus

[snol]

just means you have to reach over to the keyboard and press control while rightclicking, if you want those features.

I can do this with lynx

[KidSock]

<select name="pie">
<option value="Apple" selected>
<option value="Cherry">
<option value="Blueberry">
</select>

Mmm, blueberry.

Re:I can do this with lynx

[ChristTrekker]

On the subject of HTML, shouldn't there be one element for multiple-choice selections, with a style sheet to specify the widget (checkboxes or list) used? The same could be done with single-choice selections (radio, list). Heck, just make single/multiple an attribute (as it already is for select) and roll these two into one. Oh well, there would probably be many more changes we'd make if we could do it over from scratch.

Re:It's all about the usability...Logitech.

[Anonymous Coward]

Logitech had something like that bundled with their mice.

Mouse gestures ++

[doozer_ex_machina]

I just installed the mouse gestures stuff yesterday, and found it a real UI help, and can only wish it was more pervasive (a la mouse-wheel). I already converted two others (the only other two who actually use Mozilla) to it. I hope these menus become as useful.

Re:that useful?-downsides?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any downsides to pie menus?

Why Pie Menus Can Work

[Ian Bicking]

A number of people here have criticised this, saying that pie menus have been around for a long time and no one uses them, and they are just a plaything. I disagree. But while I think there is significant stagnation in UI inventions, it is not purely because of inertia that pie menus have not caught on.

One of the biggest advantages to pie menus is that you can learn the motions, and perform those actions automatically without visual feedback. This is very hard to achieve with drop-down menus.

However, in a large number of applications this is not particularly useful. I don't think pie menus are very useful when learning the application -- with a menu of items, it is fairly easy to scan through the descriptions. They are listed, top to bottom, and this is how we are used to reading (not top-left-right-bottom). It's also easy to skim a large number of menu items by dragging the mouse through the menubar. The only payoff for pie menus is later when you have memorized the action.

In most applications you won't have a chance to memorize the action. Most menu actions will only be performed very sporatically -- the user might only use the application once a week, or they might use a wide variety of actions which are too large to fit on a pie menu. My (wild) guess is the user has to use the particular action at least two times a day on average to learn the motions ("muscle memory").

One exception might be a word processor or a spreadsheet -- there's lots of repetitive tasks. However, in these situations keyboard shortcuts are superior -- the user is already using the keyboard, and moving from the keyboard to do gestures will not help them.

The other big exception is the browser and games. People have mentioned games already -- they are novel interfaces, and you are already expected to learn a lot of new rules to play any game, adding the pie menu interface isn't a difficult. With the obsessiveness of gaming, and the need to simplify oft-repeated actions, pie menus are a perfect fit.

Then there's browsers: when using a browser, there are a small set of actions that are repeated over and over (back, forward, close, etc). People also use a browser for long periods -- hours each day -- so they have time to learn even fairly complex actions. Lastly, they usually browse with the mouse, not the keyboard. Just like mouse scroll wheels are a useful alternative to the keyboard shortcuts (the arrow and page up/down keys), gestures can be a useful alternative to other keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Left, etc).

The other area where pie menus would seem very useful would be visual editing environments -- things like Photoshop or Blender -- where you are working largely with the mouse, and do so for long enough periods that you could build muscle memory for your most often used actions.

Re:Why Pie Menus Can Work

[SimHacker]

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

Re:Why Pie Menus Can Work

[Inoshiro]

"One of the biggest advantages to pie menus is that you can learn the motions, and perform those actions automatically without visual feedback. This is very hard to achieve with drop-down menus.

However, in a large number of applications this is not particularly useful. I don't think pie menus are very useful when learning the application..."

So you're willing to throw away a menu system which rewards someone who takes the time to learn it, and isn't that much harder to read that a pulldown menu, in favour of the pull down menu which doesn't reward advanced users at all.

No thank you.

That kind of thinking may have been acceptable in the 1980s, but we're starting into the 21st cenutry. If you really think it's so important to coddle newbies (who are only newbies for the first 6 months of using a computer) at the expense of frustrating advanced users (6 months until they die...), then include code to set which kind of user you are -- newbie or advanced. Nautilus has this concept of not limiting the user.

A pull down menu is like a set of training wheels you can't remove, or permanently being on a probationary car licence (no driving at night, etc, etc).

Re:Why Pie Menus Can Work

[Ian Bicking]

If you really think it's so important to coddle newbies (who are only newbies for the first 6 months of using a computer) [...]

I was actually thinking of anyone who's new to an application. Pie menus are a novel input, and take some getting used to, but that's okay. But I don't think an individual will see an advantage to pie menus until after they've become experienced with an application. There aren't that many applications that we really become familiar with -- as in, use-the-app-for-an-hour-a-day kind of familiar. I think pull-down menus are better for unfamiliar applications, because they are easier to explore.

I think we both agree, though, that familiar applications are used intensly enough that having a deep interface is worth it (deep as in, requires some work to use efficiently).

He's a Karma Whore

[Anonymous Coward]

If you scan his history he has a lot of very recent posts. I think he's just karma whoring. And he obviously cares enough about Karma to talk about it in his sig.

He has lots of quick bitchy little posts. And to most readers thats not really insightful stuff they want to see. Just like this post. I post anonymously so it doesn't appear at +2.

The way you look at it he is being unfairly 'punished'. But the way it should be looked at, is that its not particularly insightful for the rest of the people reading.

Either way I like the uncut Slashdot at -1.

Re:He's a Karma Whore

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I admit, I did'nt look at his history before, but I don't know if he qualifies for a karma whore or not, really, even though he did post like five comments yesterday, it looks like he usually only posts an average of one or so a day, maybe two.... don't know if that counts for a karma whore or not, but I have seen history counts that show 24 comments in a few hours. Now that's the right way to karma whore! Lol, either way, sometimes the moderators bug me as to what they mod and how the decide to mod it, and yes, I do metamoderate. Well, I feel pretty good now.

historic: Sim City (1993, on sunOS) had pie menues

[hubertf]

Last (and first ;) time I've seen pie menues in action was about 1993 in that Sim City clone that ran on SunOS (on SPARC hardware, of course :).

- Hubert

do i detect sarcasm?

[oliverthered]

It's emencly harder to move you hand in an arbitrary diagonl direction than a up/down movment.
At least for me

Another idea

[gnalle]

I always wanted a browser that allowed me to do the following with a single keypress 1) Search in page for hyperlink with text containing the word "next" .2) Press the button with text containing the word "next". Such a feature would really help a lot when reading documents created by tex2html

Re:Another idea

[Theom]

Galeon has mouse gestures for that...

Fasteroids: take the pie menu challenge!

[SimHacker]

wadetemp said: "It's my personal belief that pie menus are more of a perceived advantage rather than a true advantage. The complexity of motion makes you feel more industrious... although you may not be getting work done any faster at all."

What objective facts are your personal beliefs based on, or are they purely subjective? Question: How do you know that your personal beliefs are not merely a perception of knowledge than true knowledge? Answer: subject your theories to experimentation.

Have you performed any emperical experiments to determine if pie menus have an advantage over linear menus?

I'm sorry your personal belief contradicts my own emperical experience. In all the experiments I have ever done, and all the ones other people have done that I have read about, pie menus have been proven to be faster than linear menus.

Here are a few references to experiments measuring the usability of pie menus.

So it's not at all subjective or based on personal belief. The effect of Fitts' Law is quite easily measured, which should eliminate the need for resorting to the exposition of subjective personal beliefs.

Here is one such experiment that you can try for yourself (which requires Internet Explorer). Fasteroids is a free game that lets you compare pie menus with linear menus. Take the pie menu challange! Fasteroids tracks your selection speed and error rate, so you can compare pie menus and linear menus for yourself.

-Don

Re:Fasteroids: take the pie menu challenge!

[oliverthered]

Well here's my experiance,

I use linux+mozilla at home and IE at work,
open link in new tab is in the same directional location in mozilla as save target as in IE,
about 10% of the time I select save target as instead of open in new window in IE.

Re:Fasteroids: take the pie menu challenge!

[jwinter1]

Burned! Feel the wrath of the Don!

This is great! It's like that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen's listening to some idiot blathering on about Marshall McLuhan and so Woody trots out Marshall McLuhan himself to tell the guy he's a moron.

Oh man, moments like this make /. worth it.

Re:Fasteroids: take the pie menu challenge!

[wadetemp]

And now for objective evidence: here are my results from Fasteroids. I did the test 3 times. In 2 out of 3 test runs, I was faster with linear menus. In the first run I was faster by a slim margin with pie menus. I will discuss why below. The results from my final test:

Pie Random 10 10 8742 874.2 0 0%
Linear Random 17 17 14060 827.06 0 0%

There are some problems with the Fasteroids test that I suggest you fix before you use the data for anything.

1) Make the number of iterations for pie and linear exactly the same. Right now it has you do ~10-15 pie selections, then a unlimited number of linear selections. This is problematic because the test never ends, and fatigue becomes a factor in the linear menu test portion, which is always last.

The fact the linear portion of the test never ends is also misleading to the user. In my very first Fasteroid run I found myself wondering when the test would end after I'd done at least twice the number of vertical selections as I had done pie selections... I looked down at the results while trying to make a selection and it contributed to me missing the next selection. After that selection, I stopped, but the damage had already been done to my linear test speed. Bad data. The same thing would have happened to my pie score speed had it been the last test and it had run on forever.

2) The order of the pie and linear testing portions should be randomly switched. Sometimes you should have to do pie first, and sometimes linear. This addresses physical fatigue that happens in the latter half of the test... your data is not representative of which menu is easier/faster if for one test you are tired and the other you aren't.

On every run of Fasteroids I did, when the pie menu test ended, and the linear test begain, I was surprised by it, and had to change movement patterns... which led to a slow initial linear selection. This is not the case with the pie test, because I knew it would start with a pie the first time I clicked the starfield (on my 2nd and 3rd runs of course.) Redordering the pie and linear test sequences randomly would also solve this problem.

3) This test is not applicable to real-world use of menus. Menu options do not appear in randomized order in a browser. Rather, pie menu options are arranged so that the selection you want to make is always in the same direction; linear menus are arranged so that the selection you want to make is always the same distance. To make the test more applicable, repeated selections of the same options should be encouraged. Additionally, well-designed vertical menus are often configured so that the most commonly-chosen options are at the top. Very rarely would I need to use the option that is a the very bottom of a vertical menu as often as I would the option at the top... your test forces me to select options that are presumably rare as often as I'd selection common ones.

I have no real suggestions for improving Fasteroids to address the issues of point #3. I do believe, however, that the Fasteroids test isn't any less subjective than my suggestion (and a well known one in the field of usability) that perceived speed is just as important as actual speed. And yes, I actually felt faster using Fasteroid's pie menus, although (no thanks to flaws in the test) it turns out I wasn't. And if perceived speed is all you're going for, than hurrah for pie menus!

Re:Fasteroids: take the pie menu challenge!

[wadetemp]

Ah! I ran the test a few more times just to be sure, and found the additional rounds. So you may ignore my points #1 and #2... you have addressed them quite well. I must have run into some funky random number generation the first time... my first time back I did as well. The 2nd run was limitless twice, and I did about 30 linear selections before stopping both times (vs. 10-15 pie). My results were as follows:

Pie Random 53 53 44993 848.92 0 0%
Linear Random 14 14 11526 823.29 0 0%
Pie Constant 24 24 15712 654.67 0 0%
Linear Constant 26 25 18446 737.84 1 4%

My point #3 is still valid, however. In subsequent tests I noticed my performance on Linear Constant was directly proporational to which constant menu item I had to select. When it was in the top 3 items in the menu, my performance was identical to my random performance (linear slightly faster than pie.) When it was at the bottom, my performance was much worse than pie. But... only idiot designers like those at Microsoft think common right-click menu options like "Properties" being at the bottom somehow helps make them easier to select. :) With pies, performance is the same for all options, no matter how common. Unfortunately, to be accurate with a pie menu, you have to move farther from the center point than you do to get to the first few options in a linear menu. And my point still stands about perceived speed... I still feel quite speedy with pie menus, but I am not any faster with them in real-world situations according to your counters.

Re:Fasteroids: take the pie menu challenge!

[wadetemp]

Also, you might consider enforcing mouse centering to your test. For instance, force the use a webpage... each link on the page will pop up a single menu. Then the user must move to the next link to get the next menu. Measure the in-between-menu time spent as well as time-in-menu, and add it to your result set.

Why? In both the pie and linear menus, I found myself recentering my mouse on a point after every click. For neither menu was that a required behavior, but it was a learned one. A user doesn't just click around a webpage randomly when trying to do "save as" on links... they have objective motion directed by tasks.

I'm fairly confident if you added this you'd see decreased performance on pie menus. It's a fact that pie menus have an increased selection area (which is part of what Fitt's law is all about), but the selection area is not bounded on the outer edge... which means you can move an arbitrary distance out and it doesn't affect your success/failure rate (as long as you move far enough out)... but that also means you have to recover from that random-distance motion to move to the next task point. With vertical menus there is very little "randomness" to the motion... only the side-to-side slip allowed within the vertical menu, which is not as boundless as with pie menus.

Now... if you put an outer boundary on your pie menus that you could "throw" the cursor against, and had the mouse pointer recenter after a selection was made... I think you'd have something. :)

TROLL ALERT

[Anonymous Coward]

TROLL ALERT

Back to school!

[Anonymous Coward]

Demon! In the name of enlightened society, i command you to GO BACK TO SCHOOL!!
Back to the dark depths, with all the other demons, to torment each other all day!

Back, evil spirit, back to school!

Pi on the menu

[Anonymous Coward]

"In order to create an applepi from scratch, you must first create a perfectly round apple." :-)

Cool, but...

[Lazy Jones]

The e-mail client is still broken. Somehow I don't like reading all the hype about new features, faster rendering etc. while essential basic functions still don't work reliably.

Re:Cool, but...

[mrroach]

Would you have preferred that the person who created this add-on to have done nothing instead? Why is it that people just don't understand that a developer who works on one aspect of a project is not necessarily even capable of working on the part that _you_ are personally interested in.

How intelligent would it sound for me to say "I don't like hearing about improvements in konqueror (tabbed browsing, better javascript) when the kernel module api still hasn't been stabilized"?

Basically, what I am saying is, the two are not related in the slightest. Stop using one person's project as an excuse to complain about another.

Re:Cool, but...

[afidel]

What is broken about it? I have been using it as my only email client for well over a year now. I use ldap directory (which admitadly got broke for a couple .9 releases but returned before 1.0), multiple pop3 accounts, imap accounts on occasion (help someone with an email problem). I have a large number of filters setup for incoming email etc. I really would like to know what you think is broken about it.

Re:Cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd prefer if you'd post something intelligent next time. Please try it and refrain from being such a salad tosser.

Re:Cool, but...

[Lazy Jones]

I didn't complain about anyone in particular. I complained about the hype-spreading related to new features while basic functionality is still broken. They can add all the bells and whistles they want, but unless they fix bugs in the mail client, I must conclude that they're not taking their users seriously.

-lj

Re:Cool, but...

[Lazy Jones]

Sorting doesn't work properly. If I change to a different folder and according to the headers bar it should be sorted by e.g. date, while I cannot scroll further up, it doesn't display the newest 20% of the messages. When I click on "Date" twice, suddenly the scroll bar works as expected again (shows more messages further up and allows me to scroll to the newest messages). Happens all the time with 1.1. and is really easy to notice.

Also "Save as" for attachments is mostly broken - doesn't allow me to save with another extension if Mozilla thinks the MIME type deserves to get an .exe appended to it.

Another problem is that I have to download every f.cking 120-400KB mail virus if I want to delete it (at least there's no obvious way to delete messages without downloading them).

Urgh

[Anonymous Coward]

Heres a tip: If you have to have a webpage which explains the function of each icon, your icons are not clear enough. The entire point of an icon is to represent an action with an easily understood, iconographic representation of that action. The author of the pie menus has not done that.

Re:Urgh

[WWWWolf]

Heres a tip: If you have to have a webpage which explains the function of each icon, your icons are not clear enough

Here's a tip: If you had installed the thing, you'd have noticed the extremely helpful bunch of tooltips that appear very soon if the user doesn't try to do anything in particular. Yes, they have thought of first-time users =)

Write text in notepad - that's what it's there for

[Aanallein]

Tabs are stupid... let the window manager manage the windows, that's what it's there for.

Unfortunately at least the M$ windows manager doesn't do a very good job of it. Say I'm researching two seperate subjects and am also reading slashdot.
With Mozilla's tabbed browsing, I can have three windows - one with tabs to slashdot articles and links followed from there, one with google's results on questions on the first research topic, and another one with google's results on the other research topic.

If you'd open 50 tabs on different subjects in one Mozilla window, then yes, then tabbed browsing wouldn't be really useful (except for removing clutter from your task bar) - and this could have been done by the windows manager as well. But tabbed browsing coupled to multiple windows makes it possible to give some 'meaning' to the different browser windows in your task bar. (And please don't bring up XP's grouping on the task bar - I've tried it and hated it; not to mention that XP has way too many other problems for me to want to downgrade to it.)

Eyes Wide Shut

[Big Sean O]

You want me to hit "Reload" with my eyes shut? Ok... Ctrl-R.

The only thing I regularly do with the context menu is Save Link As... and the Get rid of frames submenu. Everything else I use from that menu (generally only "Open Link in New Tab") I try to use another shortcut.

Gestures and radial submenus are interesting, and I'll give them a try, but they don't solve the problem any more elegantly than the existing solution (at least for me).

Re:Eyes Wide Shut

[Ian Bicking]

I agree that keyboard shortcuts are great, but browsers aren't very usable strictly from the keyboard. Mostly, there's no (good) way to follow links. So you have to use the mouse, and so mouse shortcuts are worth it. That's how I think of pie menus.

In contrast, pie menus would be silly compared to keyboard shortcuts when using a word processor.

More pie meun demo movies

[SimHacker]

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

Cold Dead Fingers.

[Anonymous Coward]

They can have my Mozilla 1.1a Gecko/20020611 when they can pry it from my cold dead fingers.

FYI, Alias/SGI patents on marking menus

[Anonymous Coward]

5,689,667
5,926,178

Frame Reload?

[TyrionEagle]

Is there a frame reload? I can't find one, the top level menu reload icon reloads the whole page even when you right-click in a frame.

Not much use to me if I can't force reload the frame I've navigated to on a site I'm developing.

BTW I'm not a fan of the "This Frame" menu either!

OT: vacation

[Zathrus]

Or, at least, that would probably be the case if this were a product written for your U.S.-based employer

Hint - you have a shitty employer. Look for another job as soon as possible.

Good employers don't pull that bullshit, because they know it destroys employee morale. As long as there's someone around that knows the project, you should go on vacation. If there isn't, the release should be delayed.

History behind this concept

[superflippy]

This is something that Xerox researched several years ago. If you're really interested in gestural/marking menus, you may find their paper Contextual Animation of Gestural Commands
interesting. I used this as inspiration to build my own DHTML Marking Menu a couple years back (has been updated, should work in Mozilla). Feel free to copy the code if you get a wild hair and want to put one of these things on your own web site.

As opposed to mouse gestures...

[MrZeebo]

I've been using mouse gestures for quite some time, and love them. I was wondering how this would compare to them. At first, I was afraid it would slow me down, adding menus to my mouse gestures.

After just a few minutes of experimentation, the thing I like most about these pie menus is that the two mouse gestures I used most (Back and Forward) still work! I just right-click and move left or right, and can ignore the menu. At the same time, these pie menus add menus, which allow me to see what other options I have available without looking at the config or documentation, like I have to do with mouse gestures for gestures that I have yet to memorize.

Great work. One thing I love about the Mozilla is the truly "innovative" atmosphere where people aren't afraid to try new things. Bravo.

Link to page on Opera 7

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Here , you can read about what may be the largest Opera upgrade ever. They've rewritten close to everything.

TFFAQ sucks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot should cache anyway.

Re:historic: Sim City (1993, on sunOS) had pie men

[SimHacker]

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

pie-menu = pr0n search?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a new Gnutella GUI feature!!

Tabbed window manager

[gds]

Tuomo Valkonen has written a window manager called PWM that sounds like the sort of thing you're talking about. Windows are grouped together into frames with tabs along the top. I don't know if the windows automatically group together by application but you can certainly do it manually by dragging windows (or tabs) in and out of frames.

I want my right click back!

[oktaya]

Well.. it's all fine and dandy.. But it would be nice if I could still right click on a link to 'copy link address'.. or on a picture to 'save image'..

Is there a shortcut key to do that or something?

Oktay

Re:I want my right click back!

[oktaya]

hm.. looks like you can configure it to come up when the MIDDLE mouse button is clicked. This works better. Probably would be the default if everybody had middle buttons or an emulation of it.

Also.. it seems like the CTRL key (not configurable at this point).. dismisses the menu when you click your mouse while it's pressed.

Oktay

Submenus

[bay43270]

Overall I like it. The pros and cons of Pie menus and the typical slashdot arguments ('I don't want to learn anything new') have already been covered. I have a simple usability question:

Is it possible to navigate back up the menu hierarchy from a submenu? It doesn't seem possible with this implementation. A common component like this probably shouldn't do anything to discourage the user from exploring. One-way menus would do that.

Re:Submenus

[praxim]

I'm not sure if this question is implementation-specific, but in general, I see hierarchical pie menus working like this:

- Open a subpie (old pie menu remains in the background, new pie menu pops up around the selected item and thus the mouse's location)
- If you want to navigate back through a subpie, click the center. The problem here is that it's difficult to navigate backwards through more than one level, but if you're that deep into the menu system, you're probably paying pretty close attention to what you're doing anyway.

Re:Submenus

[jeti]

I decided to refrain from a "go up" button because of these reasons:

Starting from the root of the menu anew is actually faster.
Doing the gesture properly from scratch trains your motoric memory more.
The space in the menu is too valuable.

Bug!!!!! Permission Crisis!

[wongmld]

The installer will change the chrome directory's files ( and its subdirectories' content) into 400 unto the user who installed it! it causes us 20 mins to track down the bug!

if you see a warning msg regarding chrome://something/something/*.xul not found, you know where to solve it now .......

Whaaaat?

[Triscuit]

Who the heck ever thought this was a good idea? (as described in the links).

I wish the computer industry would focus more on usability than on "bells and whistles" that produce a bunch of "Oohs" and "Ahhs" and make programmers feel cool.

Of course, I do appreciate innovation and maybe this could lead to something more useful than it's current implementation/use.

Re:Whaaaat?

[SimHacker]

If you will read the documents that the links point to, you'll realize that pie menus ARE focused on usability, and are not just "bells and whistles".

They are provably faster and more reliable than linear menus, and you can run this experiment and prove it to yourself if you don't believe me or any of the research papers that have been published over the years:

Fasteroids is a free game that lets you compare pie menus with linear menus. Take the pie menu challange! Fasteroids tracks your selection speed and error rate, so you can compare pie menus and linear menus for yourself.

-Don

pie menus in gaming

[chunkwhite86]

I remember the game "Secret of Mana" for super nintendo had these type of radial menus. This was back in '96 or '97. I really liked them though, it was very easy to navigate with them. Hopefully that also be the case with web browsing.

Re:pie menus in gaming

[falzer]

If I remember correctly, they looked pretty but kinda sucked when using a controller to select menu items. Menu browsing with a mouse will be much faster.

Re:that useful? Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

See "Ask Tog". The principle is that the closer a menu item is to the mouse pointer, the easier it is to hit. So you get
-
-^-
-

rather than
-
-
-
-
^
for a menu.

see http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFit ts.html>

Open link in new tab

[ecarlson]

I use my middle mouse button to "open link in new tab". Makes life really easy (well, at least the opening links in new tabs part of life).

Re:Old idea can now be done

[greed]

*wavy lines*

I remember pie menus from way back in '86, there were some articles in the Amiga mags about their benefits. The only problem was, the machines of the day didn't have enough CPU grunt to do the rendering, and you couldn't fit much information around the pie because everyone's pixels were so big. On a 640x200 display, there just isn't room.

*senil yvaw*

One thing pie menus do is give an "infinite depth" target area, like placing icons right at the edge of the screen.

This allows the novice user to make a large motion, to where the pie-slice is "wider", and hit the item. But as you get used to the menu, you can make a smaller motion and hit the narrower part of your choice.

Because this implementation pops up submenus for some directions, it doesn't _quite_ reach that ideal. But now I don't know if I want to learn gestures or pies. Maybe both together; I've got lots of mouse buttons....

But you still retain the advantage all context-menus have in that the menu is "right here", instead of off at the top of the screen (and infinately tall) or at the top of the window.

Very spiffy. I've waited 16 years for this, it seems.

Some unsolicited advice for YOU

[doc modulo]

Please make your life easier by using pie menus. You can surf with much less hassle than using context menus, making your surfing almost as lazy as watching TV.

I installed the pie menus into Mozilla, tried it, then switched them off again because they interfered with my gestures and I like gestures because they were better then drop down menus.

However, after reading some more slashdot comments, it occured to me that pie menus can REPLACE gestures in mozilla completely, with some added benefits.

Pie menus have a built-in manual, gestures have the manual somewhere off-screen. This makes the use of pie menus the same as training in pie menus. The same "manual problem" exists with command line interfaces V.S. Graphical User Interfaces. I have not used all the gestures mozilla had to offer because it was a hassle to bring up the gesture manual every time, try to memorize the gesture, then go back and use that gesture. (forget, repeat and rinse).

Also, I fell into the same trap the drop-down menu users fell into. I was using a system for a while (gestures) and didn't want to change, even though the new system (pie menus) was better. I see a lot of slashdotters complain about IE/windows users doing this.

Please overcome your fear of the new and use pie menus in Mozilla, dead easy to install too. And like the author of the pie menus says: "don't give up after the first 20 seconds".

My favorite pie menu game ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Easily was "Secret of Mana". Awesome game. Go get yourself a SNES emulator and a SECRET.ROM and try it out!

Re:that useful? (Not yet...)

[Dr. Spork]

OK, I've been playing with this for about a day. I do like these pie menus, but I don't find myself doing anything very useful with them. The problem is that basically, all the options you get are what you had before when you right-clicked in Mozilla. I mean, that's fine, but I don't spend a lot of time searching for things in the very short right-click menu.

What pie menus are supposed to replace is the stupid menubar itself, or at least some oft-used features of the menubar. For example, I would like some easy mouse path to open my bookmarks menu. I open that menu quite often, and here I agree with all the pie menu evangelists: it is a pain in the ass to hunt for that menu near the top-left corner, especially if you browse at 1600X1200 or higher. (High resolution means the target occupies a tiny proportion of the screen.)

Now, if I could have an easy way to pop out a bookmarks menu anywhere on the page that would really be progress. A real breakthrough would be if my bookmarks would somehow transform into pie slices. That would be sweeet! I think with high resolutions, it's actually not so unrealistic. I mean, the pie could cover a big chunk of the screen--that's not a problem.

I'm also mad that there is no way to go "Home" with this pie menu. In general, Mozilla is really bad about giving you quick access to the homepage. When you turn off the personal toolbar you don't even have a button (unlike every other browser), and the key combination Alt+Home is just stupid. I mean, Home is waay out there, and why the stupid Alt when unmodified Home does the same thing as the PageUp key right next to it? Home should just be home.

Anyway, feel free to ignore the digressions. What I'm trying to say is: PieBookmarks ... mmmm, yummy! Gimme gimme.

Speed

[cjpez]

The problem I ran into with this particular implementation of pie menus is that when I right-click, it takes a good 1-2 seconds for the menu to come up. That's way too long for me to use it every time I want to do something. The time using a pie menu might save me is eaten up by the amount of time it takes for it to come up properly. I'm on an 833Mhz machine, too, and Mozilla is otherwise quite snappy.

I'll check it out again in a few versions, though, once it gets better, as I'm assuming it will . . .

I'm sold

[scrytch]

I tried the Fasteroids example on piemenus.com, and I must say, I found it much easier -- provided the number of options does not exceed 8. See, I have no mouse, I use mousekeys. So in this case, all I had to do was hold down ctrl while hitting the appropriate number key (ctrl makes the mouse jump). Since the menu items had infinite depth, there was no aim needed.

I like GUIs that don't make me aim (is why I just can't bring myself to like black and white, because it imposes a gratuitous physical challenge to an otherwise cerebral game, thus entirely shutting out those with physical handicaps.)

Cascading menus might be trickier. I suppose if they cascaded such that going the opposite direction the menu was opened in always escaped from it, it could just pop up more pie menus. Has to be better than the cumbersome mess of The Sims...

Mind you, if this doesn't work with the menu key, then forget it -- I have no desire to have to right-click with mousekeys, it's annoying.

Still don't see the problem...

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Most of the stories have been available elsewhere for sometimes up to two days. If Slashdot's already 48 hours behind, what's another 6? Heh.

Uninstalling the pie-menus

[thebabelfish]

I've just spent the past 30 minutes trying desperately to find out how uninstall the radialcontext XPI so I can have my Moz back. Here's how to manually uninstall it (all of this happens in the chrome directory of the mozilla install dir):

1. Move the directories overlayinfo and radialcontext to some temporary spot in case you mess up and need them back again
2. Create backup copies of the files install-chrome.txt and chrome.rdf
3. Now remove the last line of the file installed-chrome.txt. It should look like this:

   content,install,url,resource:/chrome/radialcontext /content/

4. Remove the following lines from chrome.rdf:

   <RDF:Description about="urn:mozilla:package:radialcontext"
   c:baseURL="resource:/chrome/radialcontext/content /"
   c:locType="install"
   c:displayName="RadialContext"
   c:author="Jens Tinz"
   c:name="radialcontext" />

   and

   <RDF:li resource="urn:mozilla:package:radialcontext"/>

5. Now start mozilla and it should work again.

Note: the directory overlayinfo will be recreated when you run mozilla, but it will now contain the information you want

I hate the name "PIE" Menu...

[Jace of Fuse!]

For starters -- this has been done AGES ago in games --

Take THE SECRET OF MANA for example, where they called it a "RADIAL" menu, which makes more sense.

Also, it's been done now in Neverwinter Nights.

Now, bitching about the name aside, I love Radial menus. Once you get used to the location of the various icons you can ZIP through nested menus quickly.

Not necessarily...

[Big Sean O]

If the site doesn't have a slew of links at the very top, you can press and hold the tab key while each link gets highlighted. It's similar to using tab and shift-tab to navigate forms. Then you can use the return key to 'click' on the link.

Of course, I usually surf while on my laptop, so my fingers are close to the trackpad and the keyboard all.

I get the reasoning behind pie menus, I just think they're too clumsy (for me) to take the world by storm. Once someone makes the better pie menu, I reserve the right to sing their praises... :-)

BTW, www.colorstudy.com/ianb is broken...

Ah, but the big question is....

[joshsnow]

.....who ate all the pies?

2 things

[dollargonzo]

feedback: u DO have feedback as to how far things are, unlike when u have ur eyes shut.

menu item size: pie menu menu items are a LOT larger than avg menu items, so your muscle memory doesn't need to be nearly as precise.

Re:PizzaTool source code

[SimHacker]

Forgot to mention, here's the PizzaTool source code in case anyone's still running NeWS or wants to see an example of an interactive PostScript user interface. It was a NeWS Toolkit programming example, so it's heavily commented. They forced me to remove the faxing code for the OpenWindows release, because Warren Teitleman was afraid that "it might give away Sun's multimedia strategy", as if they ever had one.

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

-Don

Re:Integration issues and component technology

[jeti]

I started the RadialContext menu as an independend pet project and have not worked on Mozilla before.
The menu actually is displayed by attaching it to the document on display.