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posted by martyb on Wednesday May 30 2018, @05:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the as-easy-as-3.14159... dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:56PM (4 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:56PM (#686506)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:23PM (3 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:23PM (#686745) Journal

    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)

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:25PM (#686774)

      Ctrl-c for "break" in a text console is a lot older than 'C' for "copy". Still mostly works today. Has break been forgotten?

      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

        by Immerman (3985) on Friday June 01 2018, @05:06PM (#687320)

        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

      by Immerman (3985) on Friday June 01 2018, @05:02PM (#687318)

      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.