Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @08:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @08:14AM (#686639)

    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).