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0 pointsWorldMaker10y ago0 comments

In High School I read through a lot of Don Hopkins' blog on Pie Menus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu) and also wonder why they continue to be infrequent in usage. The interesting thing is that apparently on Don's watch the proliferated somewhat in NextStep, but never quite made the leap to OS X Cocoa (and subsequently iOS), which seems interesting. Maybe there's an AU out there where OS X and iOS are heavily radial menu driven.

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DonHopkins10y ago

Thanks for reading my blog and mentioning it! ;)

I wrote an article for InfoVis.net about "Why pie menus aren't ubiquitous?" [1] in 2003, but since they still aren't ubiquitous, it's good to keep asking that question.

[1] http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?num=125&lang=2

They may not be everywhere, but they've turned up many places, including games like The Sims, and tools like the Grasshopper visual programming language for Rhino 3d.

Some NeXT Step applications may have implemented pie menus, but I tried unsuccessfully to convince Steve Jobs to make them an official part of the NeXT Step GUI.

On October 25 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”

I tried explaining how we'd performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.

But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying "NeVR Step"!)

In the mean time I've been developing pie menus for many different applications and platforms:

Here's an implementation of pie menus I wrote for jQuery: https://github.com/SimHacker/jquery-pie

And some documentations and thoughts on the design: http://www.donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/JQuery_Pie_Men...

The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and Simantics Visual Programming Demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs

This is a demonstration of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and Edith visual programming tools that I developed for The Sims with Will Wright at Maxis and Electronic Arts.

Unity3D Pie Menu Demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMN1LQ7qx9g

I've made a general purpose pie menu component in C# for Unity3D, which supports text items, image items, and 3d object items too!

I will make it available as free open source software on the Unity3D app store!

Here's a silly demo, showing a set of SimCity pie menus: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/PieMenuDemo/PieMenuDemo.html (If you don't have the Unity3D browser plug-in installed, it should show you a link to install it.)

They have a full set of useful notifiers so you can tightly integrate them with your application to give rich feedback during tracking (for example, modifying the 3D menu items, or previewing the effect of the menu item and distance parameter in real time, making them more like "direct manipulation").

For example, to show how you can implement feedback like The Sims pie menus with the head in the center that looks at the selected item, I've made a 3d object in the pie menu center with the webcam texture on it, so YOUR head is in the center of the menu, looking at the selected item! (That's why the demo asks for permission to use the webcam.)

The pie menu and each item has a title as well as a description. One feature I've added is the ability not only to disable an item, but also to provide an explanation of why the item is disabled! (PacMan in the demo is disabled, for example.) I wish other menus and widgets would do that -- it's frustrating when you can find an item you want, but can't figure out why it's disabled!

Another nice thing about them is that you can either configure algorithmically with an API, or with JSON data (which makes it easy to make dynamic data driven menus downloaded from a server or database), or construct them in the Unity3D editor out of objects (which makes it easier for artists to design them)!

I've made a custom Unity3D editor that lets you edit the properties, drag and drop textures and objects, edit and rearrange the items, and has some convenience commands, so you can place the 3D item objects in a circle in the 3D world, and call a command that figures out which item is in which direction by their position, and tidies them up. (That is much easier than arranging their order in a linear list of items.)

I'm going to play around with more in-world editing features, to make them easier for artists to design them.

Source code: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/PieMenuDemo/PieMenuDemo.zip

MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus Prototype developed for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc

This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata.

It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.

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