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Over at Medium which is like having a blog but with an involuntary paywall, Don Hopkins takes on the topic of a 30-year retrospective of pie menus[*]. He discusses the history of what's happened with pie menus over the last 30 plus years and presents both good and bad examples, including ideas half baked, experiments, problems discovered, solutions attempted, alternatives explored, progress made, software freed, products shipped, as well as setbacks and impediments to their widespread adoption.
[*] Succinctly explained at Wikipedia:
In computer interface design, a pie menu (also known as a radial menu) is a circular context menu where selection depends on direction. It is a graphical control element. A pie menu is made of several "pie slices" around an inactive center and works best with stylus input, and well with a mouse. Pie slices are drawn with a hole in the middle for an easy way to exit the menu.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday May 30 2018, @07:18PM (10 children)
That was one epically long rant. I still fail to see how a pie/radial menu would be better then the normal drop-down kind.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 30 2018, @07:32PM (7 children)
Two things:
- faster, easier access (large, nearby targets take less effort to click than targets that are smaller or further away.
- can devolve to "gesture controls" for frequently used options - you don't need to consciously navigate a menu, just activate the pie-menu and move up to trigger a function. Or up-diagonal-right to navigate to an option on a submenu two layers deep. No need for looking at the menu at all, anything you do frequently can be done by pure muscle memory.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday May 30 2018, @08:29PM (6 children)
I see. But that seems to compare radial menus with classical "topbar menus"; or whatever they are called where you have to move the mouse, normally to the top the screen and click your way from there -- sometimes in to various submenus and such -- and eventually select something down from there. We are just totally skipping the idea of keyboard shortcuts and commands (such as say ctrl+s to save a document etc)
Today a lot of functions have been moved to context sensitive menus where you just right click where you are and a dropdown menu appear at the pointer with the suitable options -- still in a classical top-down appearance. So when I say I don't see the point I'm comparing it to that. In some sense I guess this is radial menus but instead of being round it's a box with text options. Text option have the benefit of being "text", while say an icon still requires interpretation -- such as say the Floppy disk icon as the icon for SAVE even tho very few people use those any more or even know what they are so the association with them have become somewhat odd and less clear by each passing age or generation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:56PM (4 children)
Hotkeys of course are in a class by themselves - but they're not commonly used by non-experts. Heck, even ctrl-C and ctrl-V, probably the most universal and widely used hotkeys in the world, are completely unknown to a sizable fraction of people who've been using computers for years, even decades. Don't ask me how they've managed to overlook the hotkey text right beside the menu option on practically every program for all that time - I guess they just stop reading as soon as they identify the option they're looking for.
As for linear context menus (pie menus can easily be context menus themselves, just aligned differently), they do indeed have some of the benefits, but the targets are still generally both substantially further and smaller - the smallest dimension is the limiting factor, and text tends to be a lot shorter than icons. Plus, directional movement can be mastered fairly quickly, especially if menus are standardized so that you're always talking about the optimal motion being a fixed distance in one of the standard directions (8-way menus seem to be some of the most common, so cardinal and diagonal directions, with not all positions necessarily used). There's also no reason pie menus can't have text as well - I've seen them both as icons with permanent "tool tips" outside the control circle, or as text-only, with different text in each "pie slice", where the whole "slice" is the target region rather than just the text.
Additionally, typical linear context menus tend to appear with one corner at (or very near) the cursor, wasting 3/4 of the "close proximity" space. Though there are some programs - i think 3dsmax was one, that actually use a four separate linear menus, one in each quadrant around the cursor, with each quadrant operating independently and having it's own functionality "theme" - e.g. main menu, context menu, advanced manipulation menu, etc. They still tend to require careful aim to select the proper entry though. And really they're a little overwhelming - I'm not sure many classes of program would benefit from having that many options a single click away.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:23PM (3 children)
Ctrl-c for "break" in a text console is a lot older than 'C' for "copy". Still mostly works today. Has break been forgotten?
The many limitations of the text console hang over us today. It is still the environment in which programs are coded. Can't mix fonts, have proportional fonts, italics (underscored text was a substitute for that), superscripts, subscripts, rotated text (and so, no pie menus with text nicely aligned along the wedges), or quite a few other things. Thanks to these limitations, we index into arrays with brackets, as in a[2], instead of subscripts as in a₂, and no one really thinks about it much anymore, everyone is so used to it. Bold text is one of the few formattings a typical text console can do. Strangely, many text consoles support colors, if only 16, a cute but useless capability until syntax highlighting was invented.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:25PM (1 child)
I'm going to go with a strong Yes. When the market spends the last few decades making computing more accessible to the everyman, terminals are understandably pushed into the background. Call it a generalized Eternal September, if you will.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 01 2018, @05:06PM
Oh, but pie menu text aligned with the wedges? Not so great. Modern rendering engines can often do a wonderful job of rendering text at an incline - however, it's generally easier to *read* the text when it's horizontal. Which is one of the reasons you usually hold books, newspapers, etc. horizontal while reading, despite the fact that the rendering is identical in any orientation.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 01 2018, @05:02PM
Certainly, I even use it occasionally - but it's completely irrelevant to most computer users, who never use the console at all.
>Strangely, many text consoles support colors, if only 16, a cute but useless capability until syntax highlighting was invented.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say - that it's strange that a capability had to exist before a use was invented for it? Besides which I seem to recall color being used to convey a lot of emphasis enhancement and contextual information long before automatic syntax highlighting made it to IDEs and the like. Not to mention its extensive usage in functional "ASCII art" to improve the clarity of various text-based "graphical" interfaces.
Also, I don't recall bold being a thing back when a console was a hardware device - there was "bright", but that's basically just a color modifier, and where the second 8 colors often came from. What platform were you using that had enough pixels-per-letter to provide both normal and bold fonts?
As for the rest, I'm inclined to agree, and am actually dabbling at developing a programming interface that would break free from the long-irrelevant limitations of a text console. No reason that when programming in C, python, or what have you, you shouldn't be able to get all the visual clarity advantages of LATEX or Labview.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday May 31 2018, @07:27AM
We played with some pie menu prototypes in Étoilé. They're significantly better from a usability standpoint when they work, but they don't scale to as large a number of menu items, so trying to adopt them for an existing toolkit is quite challenging (you don't really want more than 6-8 items at each menu depth) and it's very confusing for users to have both pie and vertical menus.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Funny) by krishnoid on Wednesday May 30 2018, @08:20PM
For one thing, in radial menu, pie hole shuts you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @08:14AM
It's NOT better. Basically it's only useful for impressing the stupid or ignorant.
It's a "shiny!/cool!" movie effect for games like Crysis. But in practice it's stupid and not useful.
If there are many choices then the pie/radial menu doesn't work well, so it only works if there are a few options.
BUT if there are only a few choices and you want speed and reliability you'd use hotkeys or similar. Go look at how many speed runners use the pie menus in games. Even artists use stuff like gaming keypads (go look for those videos of animation/manga artists quickly drawing stuff using stylus and gaming keypads). Most people who use a stylus have better things to do with it than to waste motion and time using it on a radial menu. You use the other hand and feet to select options/modifiers, and radial menus aren't better than keypads/"chorded keyboards" for those.
"Old people" and similar already have problems with just selecting stuff using normal Y axis menus, good luck getting them to select stuff from a pie menu.
I was quite disappointed that it wasn't an article on pie shop/restaurant menus over the past 30 years. That would have been far more interesting and useful (useful because UI pie menus are stupid, while edible pies aren't).