Pie menus

Last week I explored, via a post from Julia, a tool which provide an innovative way to navigate through hierarchical menus without using a dropdown menu, nor a tree view, but a pie menu.

I did some search, and I found a complete page on Pie menus written by Don Hopkins, who developed pie menus since 15 years.



Pie menus are used for example in the Sims game, but I also found some nice implementation and demos as ActiveX controls, and Javascript code. It's incredibe the number of languages Don covers, including Forth, Postscript

You have some examples and also an implementation for Mozilla Radial Context.

Even an online asteroid game to compare pie menus and linear menus

I think it's an excellent alternative for a complete navigation system on a PDA and a Tablet PC, especially when the page real estate is so precious !

I will now surely think on how to implement this as .Net control, using an XML doc for the menu items.

 

1 Comment

  • Yeah, pie menus can be good. I would say they are best suited in games though. Star Wars Galaxies from sony uses pie menus right now. They animated until all the options are available. That gives you some feedback to know if it is still loading. Then you can drill in to the more complicated menus from there.



    I could see the tablet, just doing something like pocketPC does where you hold it downa nd then the menu comes up?

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