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From: don@brillig.umd.edu (Don Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc,comp.sys.next,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.amiga,comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: What are menus?
Summary: Pie menus are different that Xerox Rooms
Keywords: menu metaphors, pie menus, ROOMS, multiple virtual workspaces
Message-ID: <15562@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: 20 Jan 89 23:47:33 GMT
References: <3234@sugar.uu.net> <12907@steinmetz.ge.com> <10867@s.ms.uky.edu> <1989Jan18.125219.19180@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <4470@pitt.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@mimsy.UUCP
Reply-To: don@brillig.umd.edu.UUCP (Don Hopkins)
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction Lab
Lines: 64

>>Using linear pull down menus is like having to climb ladders to get
>>where you're going.  There's a more natural metaphore for round pie
>>menus, though.  I think of pie menus as rooms with doors leading off
>>in different directions.  
>>[...]
>>	-Don

>Actually, this has been done by XEROX.  It's called ROOMS, I think.
>I've never actually seen it, but the guy who wrote it (I forget his name) was
>up here, at the U of Toronto to give a talk on it.  He showed some 35mm slides
>and it looks pretty cool. 
>[...]
>It is almost exactly what Don wants to see in menus.  You go from
>room to room, where each room has a different "desktop".  Actually,
>each room has a different environment: different wallpaper, even!
>[...]
>--Raj

I've heard about Rooms, and I like the idea a lot. But what I'm
talking about is pie menus. i.e. not full screen desktop layouts, but
circular pop-up menus, as a metaphore for rooms. I think that the two
metaphores are well matched and could be combined synergistically.

In the pie menu "room" metaphore, a "room" is a menu, and a "door" is
a menu item.

You point to an object on the screen and click to pop up a pie menu of
items relating to that object.

The pie menu pops up with the cursor in the middle of the room, with
the doors arranged in a circle around the cursor, all leading off in
different directions.

You go through a door by moving the cursor in its direction and
clicking. Going through a door either completes the selection, causing
some action to be performed on the object, or leads you to another
room, popping up another pie submenu.

The important difference between pop-up pie menus and pull-down linear
menus is that pie menus are based on direction, and linear menus are
based on distance. With pie menus, the cursor motion necessary to make
a selection is always small, and the area of the wedge shaped
selection targets is large. You can indicate a direction without
looking at the screen, and you get more and more angular precision as
you move the cursor out further. Furthermore, they're non-proprietary,
so nobody will sue you for implementing them!

Here are a couple of references to work we've done with pie menus. If
you use the NeWS window system, I'd be glad to send you my public
domain implementation of pie menus, and a window manager designed to
use them efficiently, written in object oriented PostScript.

	-Don

Directional Selection is Easy as Pie Menus!
  By Don Hopkins
  ;login: The USENIX Association Newsletter
  Volume 12, Number 5; September/October 1987; Page 31
  Summary of the Work-in-Progress talk given at the 1987 Summer
  Usenix Conference in Phoenix.

A Comparative Analysis of Pie Menu Performance
  By Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman
  Proc. CHI'88 conference, Washington D.C.: available from ACM, NY.