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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 VLM on Wednesday May 30 2018, @08:58PM (3 children)
Thought it worked best with quadriplegics, I remember seeing a demo video from "somewhere" from years past where folks with only eye control could fly thru a 2D dictionary that zoomed in on their words, with like two eye blink clicks was yup thats the word and three blinks was ohshit startover.
Circa 1980s like minicomputer with early visual recognition low res B+W camera none the less good enough to use. Of course now a 50 cent microcontroller probably has enough power and a webcam with a macro lens added would be good enough, although software development is probably slower and harder now than in the 80s.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 30 2018, @10:02PM (2 children)
Kind of reminds me of Dasher: usage animation - http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html [inference.org.uk]
An accessibility tool that uses 2D analog input and predictive character weighting to "zoom in" on what you're typing. Rather clever, though I personally never had much use for it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:41PM (1 child)
An interesting alternative UI to avoid eye blink interference, but its slower to navigate and seems organized alphabetically whereas the 80s thing was vaguely predictive and grouped into areas, sort of a Dewey Decimal System but for individual words.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 01 2018, @04:41PM
It is alphabetic, but also highly predictive - for example if the last letter selected was "Q", then "U" will take up most of the list space for the next letter, requiring very little zooming to commit, while "Z" will be tiny and require a great deal of zooming to even appear. The result being that in practice common letter sequences such as "I-N-G" can be zoomed through very rapidly. It's been a long time since I played with it, but I think it used a dictionary as well, or at least was predictive based on the last several characters committed - so that after a few letters the sequences to complete common words beginning with those letters would also become high probability and thus much faster to zoom through.
That said, I haven't really seen that many different input aides in practice for comparison.