On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:04:21 -0400, Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence) wrote: > On 2010-08-18 14:14, Aidan Thornton wrote: > > On 8/18/10, Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)<o...@lindenlab.com> wrote: > >> While there were some good things about the v1 implementation of pie > >> menus, they also had some flaws - such as not opening a submenu centered > >> on the mouse click. > > I actually puzzled over this a bit when I first realised that Second > > Life's pie menus worked this way. Originally, the pie menus worked > > well when you didn't click too close to the edge of the screen but > > didn't actually open under the mouse cursor if you did. Since the > > "More..." item is sensibly always the southmost one, opening new > > submenus centered on the mouse would cause the pie menu to drift down > > the screen until it hit the bottom and caused problems. > > > > Also, opening the submenu at the same location has the nice > > side-effect that the mouse remains over the "More..." option for the > > pie menus that are nested 3 or more levels deep. > > > > What I have been contemplating is how to make it possible to open the > > next layer of a pie menu without moving the mouse at all. Sadly, it'd > > probably break too much from normal UI conventions to be worth doing. > > If I understood him correctly, what Q seemed to think was the right > behavior is: > > * The first mouse-down opens the pie centered on the mouse location, > so no choice is under the mouse > * If the choice is a submenu, each new menu is also centered on the > mouse > > that way, you are never making a choice within the submenu if you > accidentally double click, because the center is never a choice. this > does mean that the nested menus 'creep', but that has the effect that > each nested choice is a 'gesture-like' unique series of clicks.
A smarter approach would be to automatically move the cursor itself to the center of the pie menu (without moving the latter to avoid an annoying "drifting" effect) when you click on a sub-menu. However, I never found the fact that the pie menu was not centered on the cursor after a click on a sub-menu item to be an hinderance, since the whole idea about pie menus is that you quickly get your "muscle memory" trained and don't even have to look at the menu any more after you are trained. For example, my "muscles know" that to delete an in-world object I must right click on it, then move south, left click (for "More >"), and move north east and left click again (for Delete). With the new method, I'd simply have to replace "north east" with "east" in my muscle memory (which would make me miss quite a number of clicks at first, since this memory has been trained and used for almost 4 years now, so if you reimplement pie-menus in this new way, I'd appreciate a debug option to prevent the auto-recentering of the cursor)... Regards, Henri. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
