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| Improving Menu Usability With Pies |
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posted by Editor on Tuesday September 25, @06:21AM
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WorldMaker writes "Probably most noteworthy in The Sims, Pie Menus have been around forever. Dan Hopkins' Pie Menu page gives a nice overview of the battle he has fought for Pie Menus (he was even the guy behind the ones in the Sims!). Pie Menus are "better" than flat menus because it puts the options equidistant and equispaced from the cursor. Studies show that these menus can be relegated to muscle memory and that you can mouse through one faster than the computer and display it." GtkPieMenu is pie menu implementation for Gtk with source code (here is a screenshot). There is also a pie menu window manager (see screenshot).
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I adore Pie menus, I really wish that they showed up in something other than games.
Looking at this, it seems that a great use for pies would be an OS X style dock that worked as a pie. All running applications would enter the pie dock, which would appear when a certain key was pressed (This allows a user to call up the dock without actually clicking on the desktop, freeing up more screen real estate for those of us who use numerous windows at once.).
The only problem I see with pies is that menuing would need to be carefully done to prevent the pie from getting too big. Perhaps one dock could exist for preset menus as a popup, and another could be done as a half-pie (More like a belt in concept, but would display as a half-circle.) that lowers from the top of the screen and rotates back and forth to call up running programs.
My /. karma never ends, time to start over elsewhere.
My real email address ends in .org, and does not contain the phr
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Pretty hard to put greater than ten or so options on a menu. Sims Online is going to have to have multiple levels of menus in order to get around this.
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That all depends on how complex the game is, and whether all the menus are pie menus. If they keep the gameplay simple (As Maxis usually does.) and use a hybrid style (Like in Planescape:Torment.) it should work out well.
My /. karma never ends, time to start over elsewhere.
My real email address ends in .org, and does not contain the phr
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I used configurable pie menus through the Alias 3D modeling program on SGI's a while back. Have to agree that its a rather fantastic interface and I hoped for a while that it'd get integrated into Photoshop or other graphics programs. It's extremely fast! I can't stress that enough. No more searching and running the mouse across the screen pulling down menus, etc. When creating 3D models, 90% of the tasks are from a handful of functions. SGI's use 3 physical buttons on the mouse, each button controlled 8 onscreen pie buttons... that's 24 functions that we had access to at a press of a keyboard button and flick of a wrist.
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