I’ve been working away on my aforementioned pie menus implementation on Mac OS X, and thought I’d share a screenshot of the current version in action.
Here’s a pic of an application’s Edit menu being displayed as a pie menu:
The obvious additions since the last screenshots I posted are the title of the currently-highlighted slice being displayed above the pie menu, for easier readability of long titles, and also the ring around the pie.
The ring indicates that there are additional menu items which are not currently being displayed. Prior research has shown that about 8 items are optimal for pie menus, in terms of acquisition speed and accuracy, so we only show 8 items at a time. The ring provides the same visual information as a linear scrollbar, showing in this case that the current options are those at the beginning of the menu, and that about 60% of the entire set of options are currently being displayed. The blue band on the ring is thus exactly like a proportional scroll-thumb.
This “Scrolling” concept is only one of the overflow policies implemented, with the other two being Squeeze (just show all options in a single pie menu, using as many slices as required; a very simplistic “policy”), and Submenu, which shows 7 items at a time with the 8th slice triggering a sub-pie with an additional 7 options, and so forth.
The overflow policy can be set explicitly by the user, or else Scrolling will be used by default. Title call-outs can be disabled. I’ve also added optional sound to the pie menus (yes, the inevitable iPod clicker sound for rollover, and a suitable sound for selecting slices), and keyboard navigation (up/right to move through the slices clockwise, down/left to move anticlockwise, return/enter/space to trigger slices, and esc to close the pie menu). All colors naturally respect the system settings for menu display and color scheme (Aqua/Graphite), or can be set to any colors desired.
More as it happens.
Looking nice dude, like the look of the “scroll bar”.
God damn brilliant. You kick ass.
Thats a great looking idea. How far into the design phase/will you be distributing as shareware or freeware?
Duplication of effort?
http://iratescotsman.com/index.php/dev/mac/apple_pie.html
Very cool indeed.
So will us mere mortals ever get a chance to play with it?
Any update on your radial menu project? are you going to post what you have done so far?
very interested to use this in our application…
thanks in advance!
Like the others here, I’ve been interested in your project for some time, and it will be very interesting to get to play with this, sometime.
I find the idea of the PowerMate quite intriguing and that hardware, coupled with your Pie Menus, could be rather compelling; have you tried this yourself?
If you ever consider a private beta, count me in as interested! : )
Hi there… with Quicksilver recently adding its own radial menus interface, I wondered whether you ever developed a general OS X radial menu widget? I thought perhaps you had contributed to the Quicksilver implementation, as their menu looks a lot like what you had prototyped.
wouldn’t it be more intuitive (at least for the 8-items-implementation) to use up/down/left/right for the respective slices, and diagonals (ie combos – left-up, down-right, etc) for the remaining four?
Just my opinion, would be faster, too.
Also, I can very well imagine the submenu solution, brings up a strong mental image of a cool-looking array of “pies”…
Looks very interesting would love to get hold of the front end, perhaps we could look your ideas.