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Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective

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

canopic jug writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:How is it better? (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday May 31 2018, @07:27AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Thursday May 31 2018, @07:27AM (#686633) Journal

  Pie menus are intended to be used in the same kind of situations as context menus. You right click and the pie appears. Each menu item is in a different direction, so it's easier to move to the correct one and stop than it is to move downwards the correct distance and stop (on a target that's small, because your movement is along the vertical where the menu items are smallest). Submenus pop up when you mouse over them, so submenu items are effectively mouse gestures.

  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.

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