Pie-Menus in Mozilla 373
pronik writes "The Optimoz project on MozDev had two main development branches. While the first one, Mouse Gestures have been a success, we had to wait for the second, also very promising one: PieMenus. Now the wait is over! First implementation of PieMenus for Mozilla - RadialContext - is available for installation and testing!!!"
Re:that useful? (Score:3, Insightful)
My biggest beef with it is it forces your mouse to have to move away from the selected item. Keyboard shortcuts don't move the mouse pointer or the focus anywhere, so you are ready to move onto the next task without trying to find out where your pointer went when you were doing a "no look" command.
Waste of time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't really say that I find pie menus to be revolutionary or fantasically useful, but they are a million times better than the eight point font text links that I have to click on all the time. Luckily, Mozilla grabbed a Konqueror feature that allows you to override the minimum font size on a page. Right now, I have it set really high, but it's still a pain in the ass.
One day, you too will have bad eyesight, even if it takes another 20-30 years for you to experience the annoyances that I'm facing. I don't think you'll really appreciate alternative user interfaces until then. I know I didn't, back when I could sit down at my computer without wearing glasses.
Anyways, if we can dumb down user interfaces enough so that everything is self-evident, it will help more people get involved with computers. My six year old nephew gets confused rather easily when he sees too many options available to him. If he could browse the web as easily as he reads a book, I bet he'd be taking high school courses by the time he was ten.
Gee thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot really needs to start hosting its own mirrors for stories.
Re:Goodie... (Score:1, Insightful)
On the other hand, Opera is not a community effort, so I for one, and many others, don't care about it nearly as much. It's so nice that you like your web browser of choice, but nobody is shoving anything down your throat.
Re:that useful? (Score:2, Insightful)
Impossible to use in combination with... (Score:2, Insightful)
Naturally, I couldn't set RadialContext to the left button, since I need that button to select text and click stuff.
The middle button couldn't be used because in that case I won't be able to open links in new tabs by clicking them with this button.
The right button couldn't be used because in that case it would interfere (practically disable) mouse-gestures.
I refuse to use modifier keys since that would nullify any advantages these pie-menus might have over the standard menu in regards to efficiency.
So in short, I installed RadialContext and discovered that it interfered or even rendered a number of standard and added (mouse-gestures) features of Mozilla unusable or made them much more cumbersome to use.
It's a nice idea, but needs some more thought in regards to its implementation.
Re:that useful? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:that useful? (Score:3, Insightful)
While this flies in the face of conventional UI dogma - the mouse behaviour is "different" for the menus - It's not _very_ different, especially since the scrolling of the menus underneath makes it look like the mouse is moving as usual.
The alternative is post-menu warpback, but I tried that too, and found it much more annoying than the scrolling effect my example illustrates.
FlyMenu
Here [www.iol.ie] you can download a mockup of a proposal for scrolling menus, that would make using popup menus in art packages and the like a lot easier.
flymenu.jar (11K)
Requires a 1.3 JVM
Start with java -jar flymenu.jar
Explanation:
_Current Situation:_
When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears. you move the mouse.
"""Moving the mouse causes the mouse pointer to move.
You use this to select an entry from the menu. Menu then disappears and your action is carried out.
"""Mouse pointer is in a quite different position to where you left it before pressing RMB.
_Suggested Situation:_
When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears. you move the mouse.
***Moving the mouse causes popup-menu to scroll underneath the (stationary relative to physical screen) mouse pointer.
You use this to select an entry from the menu. Menu then disappears and your action is carried out.
***Mouse pointer is exactly where you left it before pressing RMB.
Re:Marking Menus in use-feedback. (Score:1, Insightful)
Why Pie Menus Can Work (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the biggest advantages to pie menus is that you can learn the motions, and perform those actions automatically without visual feedback. This is very hard to achieve with drop-down menus.
However, in a large number of applications this is not particularly useful. I don't think pie menus are very useful when learning the application -- with a menu of items, it is fairly easy to scan through the descriptions. They are listed, top to bottom, and this is how we are used to reading (not top-left-right-bottom). It's also easy to skim a large number of menu items by dragging the mouse through the menubar. The only payoff for pie menus is later when you have memorized the action.
In most applications you won't have a chance to memorize the action. Most menu actions will only be performed very sporatically -- the user might only use the application once a week, or they might use a wide variety of actions which are too large to fit on a pie menu. My (wild) guess is the user has to use the particular action at least two times a day on average to learn the motions ("muscle memory").
One exception might be a word processor or a spreadsheet -- there's lots of repetitive tasks. However, in these situations keyboard shortcuts are superior -- the user is already using the keyboard, and moving from the keyboard to do gestures will not help them.
The other big exception is the browser and games. People have mentioned games already -- they are novel interfaces, and you are already expected to learn a lot of new rules to play any game, adding the pie menu interface isn't a difficult. With the obsessiveness of gaming, and the need to simplify oft-repeated actions, pie menus are a perfect fit.
Then there's browsers: when using a browser, there are a small set of actions that are repeated over and over (back, forward, close, etc). People also use a browser for long periods -- hours each day -- so they have time to learn even fairly complex actions. Lastly, they usually browse with the mouse, not the keyboard. Just like mouse scroll wheels are a useful alternative to the keyboard shortcuts (the arrow and page up/down keys), gestures can be a useful alternative to other keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Left, etc).
The other area where pie menus would seem very useful would be visual editing environments -- things like Photoshop or Blender -- where you are working largely with the mouse, and do so for long enough periods that you could build muscle memory for your most often used actions.
Re:Waste of time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gee thanks (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't worry, the slashdot effect on your server usually wears off within 10-30 hours of initial posting depending on your bandwidth, but the effect of increased interest in your project might never abate.