Pie menus appeared on workstations sometime in the mid-1980s and there was quite a bit of early interest in pie menus since they theoretically reduce travel time to menu items. There is an earlier paper that compared pie with linear menus from the U of Maryland:
Callahan, J., Hopkins, D., Weiser, M., and Shneiderman, B. 1988. An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Washington, D.C., United States, May 15 - 19, 1988). J. J. O'Hare, Ed. CHI '88. ACM, New York, NY, 95-100. The abtract from the article states: "Menus are largely formatted in a linear fashion listing items from the top to bottom of the screen or window. Pull down menus are a common example of this format. Bitmapped computer displays, however, allow greater freedom in the placement, font, and general presentation of menus. A pie menu is a format where the items are placed along the circumference of a circle at equal radial distances from the center. Pie menus gain over traditional linear menus by reducing target seek time, lowering error rates by fixing the distance factor and increasing the target size in Fitts's Law, minimizing the drift distance after target selection, and are, in general, subjectively equivalent to the linear style." In the real-world, pie menus that had sub-menus and a large number of items at each level (imagine the Word menus piled onto a multiple-level pie menu) were cumbersome. Pie menus can be effective for relatively small numbers of functions. The concept of marking menus that follow a mouse pointer/cursor (especially for tablet computers) has received a lot of research. If you look in the ACM literature, there is a lot of use of pie menus in a marking menu system. The prototyping system DENIM uses pie menus. You can dig around and install a copy of DENIM and try them out in the contect of a sketching/prototyping tool. Chauncey On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 12:07 AM, John Chin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > When I saw "pie menu", I immediately thought of the pie menus designed at the > University of Maryland > by Don Hopkins et. al. > > https://drum.umd.edu/dspace/handle/1903/442 > > The website didn't seem to be the same kind of interaction that I had > expected. > I guess there are different definitions of what a pie menu really is! > > John > >> -------Original Message------- >> From: Laura Francis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Pie Menu Spotted on the Web >> Sent: Jun 25 '08 18:18 >> >> Oops! When I read the title of this post this is what came to mind... >> >> http://www.simplesimonspies.co.uk/menu_pies.htm >> >> Guess I got the wrong end of the stick! >> >> Laura >> >> PS - I wanted to link to this site, but cos its flash I couldnt link >> you to the menu! http://www.pieminister.co.uk/ They are local heroes >> round here :) >> ________________________________________________________________ >> Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! >> To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe >> List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines >> List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help >> > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
