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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: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:41PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:41PM (#686752)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 01 2018, @04:41PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday June 01 2018, @04:41PM (#687313)

    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.