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: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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[robertchin]

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

On the menu

[Macrobat]

And for dessert:

• Apple
• Blueberry
• Pumpkin
• Pecan
• Hair

Okay, enough puerile humor for one day...

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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...

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.

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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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.

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

[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.

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?

[mosch]

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

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).

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

[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

[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

[oliverthered]

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

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."

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... :)

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.

[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.

[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.

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

[twiztidlojik]

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

mmmm piemenus!

Re:If these catch on...

[wadetemp]

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

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: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?

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...

[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

mmmm...pie!

[Tumbleweed]

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

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

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

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...

[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: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.

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...

[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: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

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.

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'."

Re:that useful?

[DGolden]

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

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.)

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.

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?)

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.

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?)

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

[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

[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

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?

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.

I can do this with lynx

[KidSock]

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

Mmm, blueberry.

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)

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).

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...

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

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.

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!

[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. :)

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...

[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...

[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).

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

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>

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.

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

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?

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

[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.

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.).