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

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.

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.

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.