Human factors should not be based on opinion polls or popularity contests. That is not science, that is merely fashion. I don't care about your unsupported "suspicions" and subjective "preferences": I'm talking about objective, measurable PERFORMANCE.
That paper was co-written by Bill Buxton, who has published more CHI papers than anyone else in the world, last I heard. Since you claim to be experienced in the field, I'd be surprised if you don't know about Bill Buxton or ACM SIGCHI. Or do you know who he is, but think his research is invalid and not replicatable? Have you read the paper I refered to? Can you refute its findings? If so, then please tell us how!
What hard evidence is your opinion based on? Have you done any controlled experiments comparing the speed and error rates of track balls versus mice or other input devices? (Buxton has published many, and is recognized as an expert in that field.)
Please give me references to any results you have published, or that anyone else has published which supports your armchair rationalizations. Otherwise they're just your unsupported amateur opinions, that disagree with the facts.
The performance speed and error rate differences between input devices are not simply a question of user preference. If you'd bother to read the paper, you will realize that it greatly depends on the physical characteristics of the input devices themselves and how the human body interacts with them. The controled experiments measured the effect. It's all there in the paper.
Amateur armchair rationalizations aside, the rewsearch emperically demonstrates that trackballs are much less accurate and more noisy than mice. The illustrations of the paths in the paper make it quite visually obvious, if you don't believe the numbers. These are provable, unavoidable facts of life, not speculation subject to opinion.
There are two ways to use a pie menu with a mouse: with or without holding down the mouse button. You can start by going "click move click", but with experience, you'll learn to go "press move release". The relaxed "click move click" way to use pie menus is to click the button (press and release without moving), move the cursor, then click the button again. The accelerated "press move release" way is to press down and hold the button, move the cursor, then release the button.
When you first pop up a pie menu, the cursor begins in the menu center, and the selection depends on the direction you move. Each pie menu "item" is shaped like a slice of pie, arranged around the cursor in different directions. The center of the pie menu is an inactive area, which doesn't select any items: so you can click once to pop up a pie menu, then click again in the center without moving, to cancel.
The further out from the menu center you move the cursor, the more precisely you control the direction, and the easier it is to select a particular item. You can move the cursor far out to the edge of the screen, for very exact control.
It doesn't matter what path you take to select a pie menu item, the only thing that counts is the direction between the first and final click. This allows you to reselect different items any time before the final click, by moving the mouse around to different slices of the pie.
Mouse Ahead
If you click the button, the pop-up window will appear on the screen instantly. But if you hold the button down and move, the menu display will be pre-empted until you pause. Once you're familiar with the directions, you can press the button and move without hesitating, selecting from the menu very quickly.
You can "mouse ahead" through a pie menu, by smoothly pressing, moving, and releasing the button without hesitating, and the window will never be displayed on the screen!
Even before its window pops up, an invisible pie menu gives you instant feedback by changing the cursor shape to show how many items there are, and which item is selected.
If you want to be sure of the selection, just stop moving, and the pie menu will pop up. You can always change the selection by moving around the menu.
With experience you will be able to reliably "mouse ahead" and even select items from nested pie menus, without looking at the screen.
Nested Menus
A pie menu can have any number of submenu levels arranged in a nested tree. Any item can pop up another pie submenu, that itself can contain items with submenus.
Clicking in an item with a submenu pops it up, centered on the cursor, on top of the previous menu. Clicking again in the center of the submenu cancels the whole tree. But clicking the other button goes back to the previous level.
When you press the other button down, the cursor moves back to the current menu center. When you release the other button in the menu center, you go back to the previous menu, positioned in the same place you were when you left it. But you can also move the cursor out of the menu center before releasing the other button, and you will stay at the current level. This is convenient if you just want to get back to the menu center and select another item.
Scrolling Menus
Pie menus may be limited to a certain number of slices (like 8), so that the pie slices are wide and easy to select. If there are extra items, then they are clustered into groups of the same number outside of the pie. You can select any of the extra items by pointing directly its label.
Each group of items is arranged like a compact pie menu of the same number of items (or fewer). You can scroll the pie menu to any group by clicking in the center of the group, and the menu will center on the labels. The "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys also scroll the pie from group to group.
Keyboard Controls
Pie menus support several keyboard accellerators.
Escape or Delete:
Cancels the entire menu tree.
Backspace:
Moves back to the previous menu in the tree.
Home:
Centers the menu on the current cursor position.
Return:
Selectes the currently highlighted item, or cancels the menu if nothing is highlighted.
Arrows:
Points to the top, bottom, left, or right slice. If you press two orthogonal arrows at once, it points to a diagonal slice.
Numeric Keypad:
Selects the item in the direction of the key on the keypad. The 5 key selects the menu center.
Tab:
Select the next pie menu item. Shift-Tab selects the previous.
Page Up:
Scroll to the previous menu item group.
Page Down:
Scroll to the next menu item group.
First letter of a menu item:
Typing the first letter of a menu item selects the first item that begins with that letter. Typing that letter again selects the next and subsequent menu items beginning with the same letter.
Here's a description of the features of ActiveX pie menus, which have been around for many years, and work in Internet Explorer and other applications supporting ActiveX. Of course the source code for ActiveX pie menus and other implementations and information about pie menus is freely available, at http://www.piemenu.com,
ActiveX Pie Menu Features:
The ActiveX Pie Menu component is designed to be robust, general purpose, and easy to integrate into all kinds of web pages and user interfaces. The graphical layout is dynamic and adaptive, and the look and feel can be adjusted in many ways, but pie menus come with reasonable defaults, so they should work well in a wide range of situations.
ActiveX pie menus support any number of items per menu, and arbitrarily nested submenus.
The items can be layed out in reading order (left to right, top to bottom), as well as circular order (clockwise or counter-clockwise).
The number of pie slices can be limited to a user-friendly even number like eight or four, so the slices are always big and easy to select. Extra items are grouped into clusters above and below the pie menu, with the same number of items. You can select any extra item by pointing directly at its label. You can also scroll the pie menu up and down the "totem pole" of clusters, centering the pie on any group, so the items in that group are very easy to select, and the other groups are compact clusters further away from the cursor.
This helps you to mentally chunk items into a few recognizable groups: instead of a tall undifferentiated column of items, you have several stable clusters of eight (or fewer) items. One of the groups is the pie part of the menu, which you can page between groups, and the others groups are displayed as more compact (but harder to select) rectangular menu labels. You can scroll the pie menu from group to group, by pressing the Page Up and Page Down keys, or clicking in the center of a cluster.
Pie Menus come with a set of property pages for easy configuration, that user interface designers can use to create and edit pie menus with tools like Visual Basic.
You can plug pie menus into web pages, by configuring them with HTML properties, and programming them with JavaScript or Visual Basic Script.
You can also plug them into applications supporting ActiveX controls, with tools like Visual Basic, Visual C++, Java, and the ActiveX Control Pad, interactivally configuring them via tabbed property sheets.
There are seven tabbed property pages for documentation, menu outline editing, menu property editing, visual menu tree previewing, font selection, color selection, and image selection.
Simple nested menu description format. Just type the menu items into a text editor or html property as an indented outline, with optional tags for overriding default layout properties and actions.
The indentation of the outline specifies how the items are grouped into submenus, as you would expect. You can use a semi-colon to separate a list of items at the same level of indentation.
Each menu item can have a label as well as an optional action string (that defaults to the label), that may be used as a convenient argument to the menu handler. This is so you can have a descriptive label meaningful to the user, as well as an associated numeric or symbolic action meaningful to the menu handler.
Intelligent dynamic menu layout. Menus are automatically sized and layed out so they're as small as possible with no items overlapping.
Several user interface styles with dynamic window shapes. As well as popping up in traditional rectangular windows, pie menus can also pop up in pie shaped round windows, minimal blob windows, thought balloons, speech balloons, and spoked windows.
Dynamic window shape tracking. The popup windows can dynamically reshape during tracking, to hide all but the selected menu item, reducing clutter. This feature can be enabled or disabled for speed.
Visual control over font, point size, foreground color, background color, light and dark beveled edge colors. Preview property page for browsing the menu tree and seeing how each menu will look.
Beveled edges around any shape of window. This makes overlapping menus easier to see, and fits in nicely with the Windows desktop. This feature can be enabled or disabled for speed.
Mouse-ahead display pre-emption. You can quickly click through nested submenus without popping them up on the screen. The popup delay can be adjusted, which defines how long the cursor must be still before the menu pops up.
Double buffered flicker-free drawing. Menus are drawn into an offscreen buffer, so there is no flashing on the screen. This feature can be enabled or disabled for speed.
When you use a pie menu, preview and selection events are sent to the web page or application. Event handlers can track when an item is selected, when the selected item changes, and whenever the direction or distance changes, to provide continuous feedback of the selection.
Defered menu layout and window creation. Menus are not layed out and windows are not created until the menu is actually used.
Graphical background and target images. You can specify bitmaps to use as the menu background and the target window. Or you can use solid color backgrounds.
Press down and drag, as well as click-up operation. Supports quick "press-move-release" interaction, as well as "click-move-click" interaction, so you don't have to hold the button down.
Supports all three mouse buttons, IntelliMouse wheel, and keyboard. You can pop pie menus up under program control, or in response to any of the three mouse buttons, and even pop them up and navigate all the items and submenus from the keyboard.
Sub-menu browsing is supported, so you can click the other button to pop down a submenu and go back a level, or cancel the whole menu tree.
Pie menus are not patented, proprietary, or restricted. You are free to use them in your own products and web pages. The source code is free, and you may modify it or use it for any purpose you want, provided that the copyright is left intact.
If you make any changes, you are encouraged but not required to send them back to xardox@mindspring.com so they can be integrated back into the official source code.
If you find any bugs, want to suggest new features or enhancements, or would like to find out more about pie menus, please look at the pie menu web page at http://www.piemenu.com.
If you have problems, please check the web page to make sure you're got the latest version, then send email to the author, don@DonHopkins.com.
If you use pie menus on your web page or in a product, I would enjoy seeing it, and would appreciate it if you sent me the URL or a copy of your product.
I've written some papers about pie menu design, available on the pie menu web page, and I'd like to link to other people using or writing about pie menus, so please send me any interesting URLs.
Ted Selker, the guy who invented and developed the trackpoint for IBM, originally called it the "Joy Button". But IBM was just too conservative to call it that.
I saw a prototype thinkpad he made with TWO Joy Buttons, one for each hand, positioned just like nipples! I think it would have sold very well -- it was certainly very appealing!
Trackballs are much noisier, lower resolultion input devices than mice or pens, so they're not very good for gesture recognition. Pie menus are much more reliable than gesture recognition, especially with trackballs and touch screens, because they don't depend on the path of motion, only the endpoints.
Pie menus enable you to change and refine the selection during tracking, by moving around the menu to different items. You can also move out further to gain higher angular precision. On the other hand, gestures have no natural built-in way to cancel, change or refine the gesture, and no obvious prompting and feedback mechanism. So gestures are also harder to learn and remember than pie menus.
Once you've messed up a gesture, there's no way of controling how the computer will interpret it, cancel it, or correct it in-flight. You just have to hope your gesture mistake isn't interpreted as the wrong command, then undo the effects of the mistake (if possible), then try over again from the start.
Since pie menus allow you to easily browse the items, reselect, refine or cancel the selection at any time during tracking, they have much lower error rates than gesture regcognition, and are more appropriate for mission critical applications, use in noisy environments, and with low resolution input devices like trackballs or touch screens.
Compare the pie menus in The Sims to the gestures in Black and White: Pie menus can support many more distinct commands than gestures can, plus they're also self revealing (so they're easy to learn), and it's much harder to make mistakes with the pie menus.
Another practical example is ConnectedTV, a Palm application that lets you browse and personalize your TV guide, and automatically speed-dial channels by remote control (by "touch tuning"). ConnectedTV incorporates pie menus that you can quickly and reliably operate with your fingers. It's designed to be robust and easy to use when held in one hand, so you won't lose the pen behind the couch cushion, or miss the beginning of your favorite show because you were fumbling around with grafitti in the dark.
In 1993, Kurtenbach, Sellen and Buxton published a study comparing the speed and error rate of track balls, mice and pens, combined with pie and marking menus with different numbers of items. A link to the paper and the abstract are below. Their results are extremely interesting, especially comparing different numbers of items. (They showed that 8 items is the magic number, even better than 7!)
We describe "marking menus", an extension of "pie menus". Pie menus are circular menus subdivided into sectors, each of which might correspond to a different command. Marking menus are pie menus in which the path of the cursor leaves an ink trail. Thus, selecting a sector from a marking menu creates a visual mark similar to a pen stroke on paper. Marking menus are also unique in that they ease the transition from novice to expert user. Novices can "pop-up" a menu and make a selection, whereas experts can simply make the corresponding mark without waiting for the menu to appear.
This paper describes an experiment designed to explore both articulatory and cognitive aspects of pie and marking menus. "Articulatory aspects" refers to how well subjects could execute the physical actions necessary to select from pie menus, given three different kinds of input devices (mouse, trackball, and stylus), and as the number of items in the menu increases. Articulatory aspects were investigated by presenting one group of subjects with the task of selecting from fully visible or "exposed" menus. To investigate the cognitive aspects, two other groups of subjects used invisible or "hidden" pie menus: one group with an ink trail, and one without. In order for marking menus to work effectively, users must be able to mentally represent and associate Selection from hidden menus was designed to reveal Both number of slices per menu and input device were systematically varied. We discuss the findings with respect to menu size, input device, analysis of markings used, and learning.
ConnectedTV for the Palm takes the universal remote control idea a few steps further, combining a personalized television guide with an automatic universal remote control. So you never have to press in channel numbers: instead you just touch the name of the show you want to watch, and ConnectedTV sends the numbers to change the channel.
"Touch Tuning" with ConnectedTV is like speed dialing with the remote: you can forget all those channel numbers, and easily operate ConnectedTV with one hand.
One handed operation is an extremely important feature for a universal remote control, which should be purposefully designed into the user interface from the day one.
Like Mozilla and The Sims, ConnectedTV features "pie menus," which enable you to quickly and reliably select several different commands from one button by stroking in different directions,
without using (and losing) the stylus.
Pie menus make ConnectedTV more powerful per square inch than physical remotes that only support one function per button.
The buttons are big enough to easily select with your finger, and have useful functions in different directions. For example, stroking left or right scrolls to the previous or next page. You can stroke up on the name of a show to find out more about it, or stroke down to watch it, and ConnectedTV sends the numbers to change the channel, without you having to know or press any digits.
ConnectedTV also functions as a hot list and spam filter, so you can easily mark and find your favorite shows, while hiding shows you don't like. It's much better than the slowly scrolling on-screen guide, because it doesn't block the tv screen, you can take it anywhere with up to two weeks of guide, and use it at your own pace.
ConnectedTV is indispensable if you have hundreds of digital cable or satellite channels, because you can filter out the channels and shows you don't like, and mark your favorites so they're easy to find whenever they're on.
ConnectedTV for the Palm takes the universal remote control idea a few steps further, combining a personalized television guide with an automatic universal remote control. So you never have to press in channel numbers: instead you just touch the name of the show you want to watch, and ConnectedTV sends the numbers to change the channel.
"Touch Tuning" with ConnectedTV is like speed dialing with the remote: you can forget all those channel numbers, and easily operate ConnectedTV with one hand. ConnectedTV features "pie menus," which enable you to quickly and reliably select several different commands from one button by stroking in different directions.
ConnectedTV is indispensable if you have hundreds of digital cable or satellite channels, because you can filter out the channels and shows you don't like, and mark your favorites so they're easy to find whenever they're on.
One handed operation is an extremely important feature for a universal remote control, which should be purposefully designed into the user interface from the day one.
ConnectedTV for the Palm is a universal remote control integrated with a personalized television guide, that's designed to be easily used with one hand.
Like Mozilla and The Sims, it features "pie menus", which enable you to easily and reliably select several different functions from each button, without using (and losing) the stylus.
Pie menus make ConnectedTV more powerful per square inch than physical remotes that only support one function per button.
The buttons are big enough to easily select with your finger, and have useful functions in different directions. For example, stroking left or right scrolls to the previous or next page. You can stroke up on the name of a show to find out more about it, or stroke down to watch it, and ConnectedTV sends the numbers to change the channel, without you having to know or press any digits.
"Touch Tuning" with ConnectedTV is like speed dialing for the remote control. It also functions as a hot list and spam filter, so you can easily mark and find your favorite shows, while hiding shows you don't like. It's much better than the slowly scrolling on-screen guide, because it doesn't block the tv screen, you can take it anywhere with up to two weeks of guide, and use it at your own pace.
Slashdot Mirror
Human factors should not be based on opinion polls or popularity contests. That is not science, that is merely fashion. I don't care about your unsupported "suspicions" and subjective "preferences": I'm talking about objective, measurable PERFORMANCE.
-Don
What hard evidence is your opinion based on? Have you done any controlled experiments comparing the speed and error rates of track balls versus mice or other input devices? (Buxton has published many, and is recognized as an expert in that field.)
Please give me references to any results you have published, or that anyone else has published which supports your armchair rationalizations. Otherwise they're just your unsupported amateur opinions, that disagree with the facts.
-Don
Amateur armchair rationalizations aside, the rewsearch emperically demonstrates that trackballs are much less accurate and more noisy than mice. The illustrations of the paths in the paper make it quite visually obvious, if you don't believe the numbers. These are provable, unavoidable facts of life, not speculation subject to opinion.
-Don
Pie Menu Instructions
By Don Hopkins (don@DonHopkins.com)
How To Choose With Pie Menus
Mouse Control
There are two ways to use a pie menu with a mouse: with or without holding down the mouse button. You can start by going "click move click", but with experience, you'll learn to go "press move release". The relaxed "click move click" way to use pie menus is to click the button (press and release without moving), move the cursor, then click the button again. The accelerated "press move release" way is to press down and hold the button, move the cursor, then release the button.
When you first pop up a pie menu, the cursor begins in the menu center, and the selection depends on the direction you move. Each pie menu "item" is shaped like a slice of pie, arranged around the cursor in different directions. The center of the pie menu is an inactive area, which doesn't select any items: so you can click once to pop up a pie menu, then click again in the center without moving, to cancel.
The further out from the menu center you move the cursor, the more precisely you control the direction, and the easier it is to select a particular item. You can move the cursor far out to the edge of the screen, for very exact control.
It doesn't matter what path you take to select a pie menu item, the only thing that counts is the direction between the first and final click. This allows you to reselect different items any time before the final click, by moving the mouse around to different slices of the pie.
Mouse Ahead
If you click the button, the pop-up window will appear on the screen instantly. But if you hold the button down and move, the menu display will be pre-empted until you pause. Once you're familiar with the directions, you can press the button and move without hesitating, selecting from the menu very quickly.
You can "mouse ahead" through a pie menu, by smoothly pressing, moving, and releasing the button without hesitating, and the window will never be displayed on the screen!
Even before its window pops up, an invisible pie menu gives you instant feedback by changing the cursor shape to show how many items there are, and which item is selected.
If you want to be sure of the selection, just stop moving, and the pie menu will pop up. You can always change the selection by moving around the menu.
With experience you will be able to reliably "mouse ahead" and even select items from nested pie menus, without looking at the screen.
Nested Menus
A pie menu can have any number of submenu levels arranged in a nested tree. Any item can pop up another pie submenu, that itself can contain items with submenus.
Clicking in an item with a submenu pops it up, centered on the cursor, on top of the previous menu. Clicking again in the center of the submenu cancels the whole tree. But clicking the other button goes back to the previous level.
When you press the other button down, the cursor moves back to the current menu center. When you release the other button in the menu center, you go back to the previous menu, positioned in the same place you were when you left it. But you can also move the cursor out of the menu center before releasing the other button, and you will stay at the current level. This is convenient if you just want to get back to the menu center and select another item.
Scrolling Menus
Pie menus may be limited to a certain number of slices (like 8), so that the pie slices are wide and easy to select. If there are extra items, then they are clustered into groups of the same number outside of the pie. You can select any of the extra items by pointing directly its label.
Each group of items is arranged like a compact pie menu of the same number of items (or fewer). You can scroll the pie menu to any group by clicking in the center of the group, and the menu will center on the labels. The "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys also scroll the pie from group to group.
Keyboard Controls
Pie menus support several keyboard accellerators.
Escape or Delete: Cancels the entire menu tree.
Backspace: Moves back to the previous menu in the tree.
Home: Centers the menu on the current cursor position.
Return: Selectes the currently highlighted item, or cancels the menu if nothing is highlighted.
Arrows: Points to the top, bottom, left, or right slice. If you press two orthogonal arrows at once, it points to a diagonal slice.
Numeric Keypad: Selects the item in the direction of the key on the keypad. The 5 key selects the menu center.
Tab: Select the next pie menu item. Shift-Tab selects the previous.
Page Up: Scroll to the previous menu item group.
Page Down: Scroll to the next menu item group.
First letter of a menu item: Typing the first letter of a menu item selects the first item that begins with that letter. Typing that letter again selects the next and subsequent menu items beginning with the same letter.
-Don http://www.piemenu.com/PieMenuDescription.html
A Description of Pie Menus, By Don Hopkins (don@DonHopkins.com).
Pictures of Pie Menus. [See the web page http://www.piemenu.com/PieMenuDescription.html for illustrations.]
ActiveX Pie Menu Features: The ActiveX Pie Menu component is designed to be robust, general purpose, and easy to integrate into all kinds of web pages and user interfaces. The graphical layout is dynamic and adaptive, and the look and feel can be adjusted in many ways, but pie menus come with reasonable defaults, so they should work well in a wide range of situations.
ActiveX pie menus support any number of items per menu, and arbitrarily nested submenus.
The items can be layed out in reading order (left to right, top to bottom), as well as circular order (clockwise or counter-clockwise).
The number of pie slices can be limited to a user-friendly even number like eight or four, so the slices are always big and easy to select. Extra items are grouped into clusters above and below the pie menu, with the same number of items. You can select any extra item by pointing directly at its label. You can also scroll the pie menu up and down the "totem pole" of clusters, centering the pie on any group, so the items in that group are very easy to select, and the other groups are compact clusters further away from the cursor.
This helps you to mentally chunk items into a few recognizable groups: instead of a tall undifferentiated column of items, you have several stable clusters of eight (or fewer) items. One of the groups is the pie part of the menu, which you can page between groups, and the others groups are displayed as more compact (but harder to select) rectangular menu labels. You can scroll the pie menu from group to group, by pressing the Page Up and Page Down keys, or clicking in the center of a cluster.
Pie Menus come with a set of property pages for easy configuration, that user interface designers can use to create and edit pie menus with tools like Visual Basic.
You can plug pie menus into web pages, by configuring them with HTML properties, and programming them with JavaScript or Visual Basic Script.
You can also plug them into applications supporting ActiveX controls, with tools like Visual Basic, Visual C++, Java, and the ActiveX Control Pad, interactivally configuring them via tabbed property sheets.
There are seven tabbed property pages for documentation, menu outline editing, menu property editing, visual menu tree previewing, font selection, color selection, and image selection.
Simple nested menu description format. Just type the menu items into a text editor or html property as an indented outline, with optional tags for overriding default layout properties and actions.
The indentation of the outline specifies how the items are grouped into submenus, as you would expect. You can use a semi-colon to separate a list of items at the same level of indentation.
Each menu item can have a label as well as an optional action string (that defaults to the label), that may be used as a convenient argument to the menu handler. This is so you can have a descriptive label meaningful to the user, as well as an associated numeric or symbolic action meaningful to the menu handler.
Intelligent dynamic menu layout. Menus are automatically sized and layed out so they're as small as possible with no items overlapping.
Several user interface styles with dynamic window shapes. As well as popping up in traditional rectangular windows, pie menus can also pop up in pie shaped round windows, minimal blob windows, thought balloons, speech balloons, and spoked windows.
Dynamic window shape tracking. The popup windows can dynamically reshape during tracking, to hide all but the selected menu item, reducing clutter. This feature can be enabled or disabled for speed.
Visual control over font, point size, foreground color, background color, light and dark beveled edge colors. Preview property page for browsing the menu tree and seeing how each menu will look.
Beveled edges around any shape of window. This makes overlapping menus easier to see, and fits in nicely with the Windows desktop. This feature can be enabled or disabled for speed.
Mouse-ahead display pre-emption. You can quickly click through nested submenus without popping them up on the screen. The popup delay can be adjusted, which defines how long the cursor must be still before the menu pops up.
Double buffered flicker-free drawing. Menus are drawn into an offscreen buffer, so there is no flashing on the screen. This feature can be enabled or disabled for speed.
When you use a pie menu, preview and selection events are sent to the web page or application. Event handlers can track when an item is selected, when the selected item changes, and whenever the direction or distance changes, to provide continuous feedback of the selection.
Defered menu layout and window creation. Menus are not layed out and windows are not created until the menu is actually used.
Graphical background and target images. You can specify bitmaps to use as the menu background and the target window. Or you can use solid color backgrounds.
Press down and drag, as well as click-up operation. Supports quick "press-move-release" interaction, as well as "click-move-click" interaction, so you don't have to hold the button down.
Supports all three mouse buttons, IntelliMouse wheel, and keyboard. You can pop pie menus up under program control, or in response to any of the three mouse buttons, and even pop them up and navigate all the items and submenus from the keyboard.
Sub-menu browsing is supported, so you can click the other button to pop down a submenu and go back a level, or cancel the whole menu tree.
Pie menus are not patented, proprietary, or restricted. You are free to use them in your own products and web pages. The source code is free, and you may modify it or use it for any purpose you want, provided that the copyright is left intact.
If you make any changes, you are encouraged but not required to send them back to xardox@mindspring.com so they can be integrated back into the official source code.
If you find any bugs, want to suggest new features or enhancements, or would like to find out more about pie menus, please look at the pie menu web page at http://www.piemenu.com.
If you have problems, please check the web page to make sure you're got the latest version, then send email to the author, don@DonHopkins.com.
If you use pie menus on your web page or in a product, I would enjoy seeing it, and would appreciate it if you sent me the URL or a copy of your product.
I've written some papers about pie menu design, available on the pie menu web page, and I'd like to link to other people using or writing about pie menus, so please send me any interesting URLs.
I saw a prototype thinkpad he made with TWO Joy Buttons, one for each hand, positioned just like nipples! I think it would have sold very well -- it was certainly very appealing!
-Don
Pie menus enable you to change and refine the selection during tracking, by moving around the menu to different items. You can also move out further to gain higher angular precision. On the other hand, gestures have no natural built-in way to cancel, change or refine the gesture, and no obvious prompting and feedback mechanism. So gestures are also harder to learn and remember than pie menus.
Once you've messed up a gesture, there's no way of controling how the computer will interpret it, cancel it, or correct it in-flight. You just have to hope your gesture mistake isn't interpreted as the wrong command, then undo the effects of the mistake (if possible), then try over again from the start.
Since pie menus allow you to easily browse the items, reselect, refine or cancel the selection at any time during tracking, they have much lower error rates than gesture regcognition, and are more appropriate for mission critical applications, use in noisy environments, and with low resolution input devices like trackballs or touch screens.
Compare the pie menus in The Sims to the gestures in Black and White: Pie menus can support many more distinct commands than gestures can, plus they're also self revealing (so they're easy to learn), and it's much harder to make mistakes with the pie menus.
Another practical example is ConnectedTV, a Palm application that lets you browse and personalize your TV guide, and automatically speed-dial channels by remote control (by "touch tuning"). ConnectedTV incorporates pie menus that you can quickly and reliably operate with your fingers. It's designed to be robust and easy to use when held in one hand, so you won't lose the pen behind the couch cushion, or miss the beginning of your favorite show because you were fumbling around with grafitti in the dark.
In 1993, Kurtenbach, Sellen and Buxton published a study comparing the speed and error rate of track balls, mice and pens, combined with pie and marking menus with different numbers of items. A link to the paper and the abstract are below. Their results are extremely interesting, especially comparing different numbers of items. (They showed that 8 items is the magic number, even better than 7!)
-Don
An empirical evaluation of some articulatory and cognitive aspects of marking menus.
ABSTRACT
We describe "marking menus", an extension of "pie menus". Pie menus are circular menus subdivided into sectors, each of which might correspond to a different command. Marking menus are pie menus in which the path of the cursor leaves an ink trail. Thus, selecting a sector from a marking menu creates a visual mark similar to a pen stroke on paper. Marking menus are also unique in that they ease the transition from novice to expert user. Novices can "pop-up" a menu and make a selection, whereas experts can simply make the corresponding mark without waiting for the menu to appear.
This paper describes an experiment designed to explore both articulatory and cognitive aspects of pie and marking menus. "Articulatory aspects" refers to how well subjects could execute the physical actions necessary to select from pie menus, given three different kinds of input devices (mouse, trackball, and stylus), and as the number of items in the menu increases. Articulatory aspects were investigated by presenting one group of subjects with the task of selecting from fully visible or "exposed" menus. To investigate the cognitive aspects, two other groups of subjects used invisible or "hidden" pie menus: one group with an ink trail, and one without. In order for marking menus to work effectively, users must be able to mentally represent and associate Selection from hidden menus was designed to reveal Both number of slices per menu and input device were systematically varied. We discuss the findings with respect to menu size, input device, analysis of markings used, and learning.
"Touch Tuning" with ConnectedTV is like speed dialing with the remote: you can forget all those channel numbers, and easily operate ConnectedTV with one hand.
One handed operation is an extremely important feature for a universal remote control, which should be purposefully designed into the user interface from the day one.
Like Mozilla and The Sims, ConnectedTV features "pie menus," which enable you to quickly and reliably select several different commands from one button by stroking in different directions, without using (and losing) the stylus. Pie menus make ConnectedTV more powerful per square inch than physical remotes that only support one function per button.
The buttons are big enough to easily select with your finger, and have useful functions in different directions. For example, stroking left or right scrolls to the previous or next page. You can stroke up on the name of a show to find out more about it, or stroke down to watch it, and ConnectedTV sends the numbers to change the channel, without you having to know or press any digits.
ConnectedTV also functions as a hot list and spam filter, so you can easily mark and find your favorite shows, while hiding shows you don't like. It's much better than the slowly scrolling on-screen guide, because it doesn't block the tv screen, you can take it anywhere with up to two weeks of guide, and use it at your own pace.
ConnectedTV is indispensable if you have hundreds of digital cable or satellite channels, because you can filter out the channels and shows you don't like, and mark your favorites so they're easy to find whenever they're on.
-info@Connected.TV
"Touch Tuning" with ConnectedTV is like speed dialing with the remote: you can forget all those channel numbers, and easily operate ConnectedTV with one hand. ConnectedTV features "pie menus," which enable you to quickly and reliably select several different commands from one button by stroking in different directions.
ConnectedTV is indispensable if you have hundreds of digital cable or satellite channels, because you can filter out the channels and shows you don't like, and mark your favorites so they're easy to find whenever they're on.
-info@Connected.TV
ConnectedTV for the Palm is a universal remote control integrated with a personalized television guide, that's designed to be easily used with one hand.
Like Mozilla and The Sims, it features "pie menus", which enable you to easily and reliably select several different functions from each button, without using (and losing) the stylus. Pie menus make ConnectedTV more powerful per square inch than physical remotes that only support one function per button.
The buttons are big enough to easily select with your finger, and have useful functions in different directions. For example, stroking left or right scrolls to the previous or next page. You can stroke up on the name of a show to find out more about it, or stroke down to watch it, and ConnectedTV sends the numbers to change the channel, without you having to know or press any digits.
"Touch Tuning" with ConnectedTV is like speed dialing for the remote control. It also functions as a hot list and spam filter, so you can easily mark and find your favorite shows, while hiding shows you don't like. It's much better than the slowly scrolling on-screen guide, because it doesn't block the tv screen, you can take it anywhere with up to two weeks of guide, and use it at your own pace.
-info@Connected.TV