Talk:Pie menu

Objectivity?
This article seems like it's about 10% information and 90% mindless cheerleading for pie menus. Most of this should probably be cut out. Knight508 (talk) 14:42, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Image fair use?
Would that image be considered fair usage? --Dante Alighieri

Well it's just cropped from http://www.piemenus.com/

I guess it would be fair use...

Another meaning
I guess pie menu can also mean the menu at a restaurant that lists the pies available. lol FLaRN 2005 02:18, 30 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Not sure how serious you are, but... a quick Google for "pie menu" (with the quotes) seems to only give information about what the article is about, so I don't think your meaning is used very often, and there doesn't need to be a disambiguation link on top or anything like that. Retodon8 23:04, 30 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Not sure how serious you are, but... this is why people make fun of Wikipedia contributors ...  --69.139.198.89 05:05, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Front row?
The caption says "Mac OS X's Front Row uses a pie menu". Does it? I haven't used it, but that doesn't look like a pie menu to me. As the article points out, pie menus are designed to be used with a mouse, i.e., all items are equidistant from the cursor when first displayed.

F.R. is designed to be used with the Apple Remote, which isn't a mouse (or pointing device) at all. The first advantage of pie menus is listed as "size and proximity of menu items" -- does this apply to F.R. at all, if it isn't used with a mouse?

F.R. is cool, but it doesn't look like a pie menu to me.

Ersatz Pie Menus
I agree: the caption "Mac OS X's Front Row uses a pie menu" is wrong. The "Front Row" has none of the advantages of pie menus, which flow from Fitts' Law. A circular layout does not a pie menu make. It has to do with the way the input device operates, not how the screen looks. Pie menus can be used with other input devices than the mouse (like a touch screen "finger pie"), but the important thing is that the pointing device starts out in the center of the menu, and the direction of movement selects the item. So for example, the dial of an iPod is definitely not a pie menu, just because it's round. -Don Hopkins (pie menu developer since 1986).

Fair use rationale for Image:Piemenu2.png
Image:Piemenu2.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

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Palm keyboard based on pie menu principles
I think I remember seeing a third-party software keyboard for Palm PDA's that used the principles of a pie menu to present a full keyboard. It was a lot more complex than the examples on the page, it looked kind of square, and I admit I never used it, but I was just wondering if anyone knows what I'm talking about and could add it to the page.

Is Don Hopkins the inventor of pie menus?
There needs to be a citation to prove that Don Hopkins invented pie menus because reading the literature this statement appears false. See this academic paper on the history of pie menus written by Dr. Gordon Kurtenbach at Alias:. Note especially that the above referenced paper mentions that the first implementation of pie menus is attributed to a system called PIXIE in 1969. If this true it then follows that Don Hopkins is not the inventor of pie menus. --Kristensson 02:32, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

I removed the initial inventor part, for rationale see my above comment. --Kristensson 23:56, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Don Hopkins responds:

I have never claimed to have invented pie menus, although there are some publications out there that mistakenly make that claim. Mike Gallaher and I came up with the idea independently, on April 13, 1986. 

On April 13, 1986, Mike Gallaher and I were brainstorming about Emacs and user interface design, and we came up with the following idea, which seemed worth writing down and pursuing:

Clicking some sequence, say, double-right, lays down a help diagram showing what each direction of the mouse does. Moving outside the diagram exits this mode and removes the diagram. While in that mode, single clicks on the mouse keys cycle through the menu when the cursor is in the neutral area. Clicking while cursor is in one of the item's sectors selects that item.

menu is laid out so that all choices are initially equidistant from the cursor, so only direction is needed to choose one. The diagram stays as long as the button is held, while the cursor moves within it. The selection is indicated by the sector in which the cursor lies when the mouse button is released.

The output of the selection is the direction, perhaps

applications

mouse menu for inputting numbers from circular scale (say, degrees).

time: press left to set hour hand, middle to set minute hand.

I described the idea to Mark Weiser, my undergraduate advisor at the University of Maryland, and he encouraged me to write it up, implement the idea, and empirically evaluate it.

Mark Weiser said "I don't know of anything similar. Anyone else? Other comments?", and Ben Shneiderman replied "I finally got around to reading your preliminary ideas about theta menus and like the idea very much. I do not know of anything similar...you are on to something. You should build a few and try them out as improvements to existing strategies, then conduct an evaluation to get the data." We conducted an evaluation, and the data showed pie menus to be superior to linear menus, so I have refined the idea, developed and shipped many pie menu components and applications since that time.

I've listed and linked to at least eight implementations I can remember that I've written and published as free or open source software (Python, OpenLaszlo, JavaScript, ActiveX, TCL/Tk, NeWS (several different versions: NeWS 1.0, NeWS 1.1, SGI 4Sight, TNT 1.0, TNT 2.0), X10 "uwm" window manager, X10 prototype), and I also implemented the pie menus in proprietary applications such as UniPress Emacs, The Sims, SimCity, as well as other proprietary or unpublished implementations (ScriptX, Palm ConnectedTV, iPhone).

Don Hopkins

Cognitive Load
I disagree with this unsourced statement:

"Pie menus come with a higher cognitive load, because of the use of higher order cognitive processes associated with memory recall than with visual navigation."

Is there any published research to back the claim up? If not, then remove it. Muscle memory doesn't require a high cognitive load, but visual navigation does.

Remembering a direction and mousing ahead into a pie menu without looking at the screen requires a much lower cognitive load than engaging in a hand/eye feedback loop to hit a small rectangular target, which requires your entire visual attention.

Muscle memory enables users to select pie menu items whose direction they can remember, without looking at the screen. Visual navigation of linear menus requires the user to focus their attention on the screen in a hand/eye feedback loop, looking at the cursor and moving the mouse until they see the cursor has entered the desired rectangular target.

Linear menu targets are typically too small to hit without looking at the screen, because it's easy to move too far past the item without knowing it. Pie menu targets are wedge shaped and extend out to the edge of the screen, and selected purely by direction, not distance, so you can increase your selection accuracy by moving further out to the wider part of the slice, instead of missing the target by not moving far enough or moving too far.

This has been discussed in the various papers and articles linked on the web page, so it's not original research.

Don Hopkins —Preceding undated comment was added at 16:24, 23 September 2008 (UTC).
 * I was not referring to the use of muscle memory when I wrote that the cognitive load on recollection is higher than that of visual navigation. This has more to do with the recollection of what the menu holds rather than the direction used utilized to acces menu item X. But perhaps that should be moved to the context menus article because it is relevant to all types of menus that have its alternatives hidden? What do you think? First you have to remember that menu item X actually is there. One link to a relatively recent research paper on the phenomenon have been added. Please tell me if you want additional more recent or earlier resources. NiklasBr (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 11:57, 26 September 2008 (UTC).
 * I agree, it should be moved to context menus, as pie menus can actually address the problem by using meaningful associations between the menu items and their radial placement (i.e., left = back, right = forward). I removed the statements for now, but you can get the text from the history page. --Quetzilla (talk) 02:37, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It's unclear the meaning of the phrase "Pie menus come with a higher cognitive load", since there are several referents in the previous paragraph. Compared to what? linear context menus? nested pie menus? toolbars and menu bars? If it's the latter, then yes, this should be moved to the context menus article. Diego (talk) 13:11, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Where are the pie menus?
The state of this article is very indicative of the state of the pie menu in general; an old idea with many proponents in theory but still struggling for relevance in reality. To increase its encyclopedic usefulness, it should be way lighter on the "advantages of the pie menu" soapboxing and a lot more robust on describing the actual, real-world uses of pie menus: video game UIs. Most people know pie menus as the "late 90s LucasArts adventure game UI" or the "Sims UI". Please stop burying this information in order to give your pet concept more utility software cred. It's not working. 80.221.34.183 (talk) 00:48, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't get what you're trying to say, or know why you don't want to identify yourself. What's your problem with the way this article describing the advantages of pie menus? And why do you believe pie menus are mainly applicable to games in the real world? Are you unaware of their uses in window managers, web browsers, text editors, remote control interfaces, 3d graphics editing tools, and as general purpose user interface toolkit widgets? What more do you want to be said about their uses in video games, that's missing or "buried"? What research have you published or can you cite, to establish how "most people" know pie menus, or whether this conspiracy to "give a pet concept more utility software cred" is working or not, or even exists outside of your own imagination? It sounds like you have an axe to grind, so I'd like to understand what your problem is, and know who you are and what your background is. Please follow up. Xardox (talk) 11:03, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I undid your edits, because you removed several notable implementations of pie menus without any justification. Since you sound like you have an axe to grind, don't provide any evidence for your opinions, don't identify yourself, and you actually removed the most important reference to the first published paper about pie menus ("# PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communications"; by Wiseman, N. E., Lemke, H. U., and Hiles, J. O.; Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southhampton, IEEE Conference Publication 51, p. 463."), I am reverting your edits. Xardox (talk) 11:19, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Hello Don! While you accuse me of believing in conspiracies, your insistence on me "identifying myself" belies the belief that, apparently, _I_ am a conspiracy intended to dilute the Wikipedia visibility of the almighty pie menu. I will have to disappoint you. I am simply a Wikipedia editor with no background in the UI design or software development fields, who arrived to this page via templates and came to the conclusions I did through critical notes placed on the page by other editors, most likely also part of no conspiracy.


 * I have reinstated an adapted version of my edit of the article. Please refrain from reverting it for silly reasons like I "don't identify myself" (anonymous editors are perfectly able to make justified edits to Wikipedia) or that I don't provide refereed publications to source my talkpage opinions. If the long list of links you have provided represents a selection of notable pie menu implementations, don't just revert, assert their notability, as a template has been calling on you to do for six months! If your pie menu code (or that of others hosted on your website) has become widely used in notable applications, then link to those applications, not just the code. The Sims is unquestionably notable - if you could provide an open-source (or otherwise freeware) implementation of the pie menu implementation in that application, it would make an awesome addition to the Notable implementations section, if described as such! A rare 1992 third-party addon to a 1989 game? Not so much! (Yet note that I preserved it as an external link - though consolidating those into single links to donhopkins.com and piemenu.com would also, in the long run, benefit the article. In my humble opinion.) The OLPC implementations fall somewhere in between these categories and would benefit from additional documentation - since you have the information, be unafraid to share it!


 * Finally, you are correct that the Wiseman-Lemke-Hiles paper is a very important reference for anyone willing to engage in serious research on the subject of the pie menu, and I was wrong to delete it - but you were equally wrong to place and replace it in the "Notable implementations" section, as it demonstrably is not an implementation. It's a reference. Being that it is my sincere interest to improve this article and its accessibility to future readers interested in the pie menu, I put the reference under its correct header. May your next edit be equally motivated by the common interest of universal knowledge and the advancement of humankind! This has been your tutorial on collaborative editing and cooperation on Wikipedia. Yours truly, a TeliaSonera Finland plc IP address, 80.221.34.183 (talk) 13:50, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Marking menus vs. Pie menus
The introduction of the article is misleading. Marking menus are an extension of the original pie menus, they're not the same technique. Dragice (talk) 08:40, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the remark, I'll try to reword it. Can you provide more details to give context to the technique? I have no knowledge of marking menus beyond the linked article. Any source you could refer to would be valuable. Diego Moya (talk) 11:05, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Correcting a common misconception about Marking Menus
The following text is incorrect: "A marking menu is a variant of the technique where the menu is not shown when the interaction is short, allowing for faster operation times when several gestures are chained to make a selection through the first and subsequent menus." That is probably based on a misconception or mistaken assumption in some papers published by Buxton and Kurtenbach.

It's a misconception that the idea of "marking ahead" was original to marking menus. The earlier papers on marking menus may have mistakenly implied that, because the authors were not familiar with my implementation of pie menus first hand, and didn't discuss it with me, but pie menus have always supported "mouse ahead display pre-emption".

That property is described in an article I wrote on March 10 1988, "How to Choose with Pie Menus":

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/95

Also the article I wrote in Dec 1991 Dr. Dobb's Journal in the section "Pie Menu Advantages" describes "mark ahead":

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/98

Also "A Pie Menu Cookbook" that I wrote in October 1987 describes mouse ahead:

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/taxonomy_menu/4/49/14/19

"Experienced users can select from familiar pie menus without looking at the menu, and can even mouse ahead into menus faster than the computer can update the screen. When the user selects by mousing ahead into a menu, suppressing the menu display can speed up interaction considerably."

Pie menus also support "reselection", which is the ability to correct your selection in-flight. That is something that gesture based hierarchal marking menus can't support, because they base the selection on analyzing the actual shape of the path instead of just the angle between the endpoints.

The idea is that every possible pie menu gesture (sequence of one down, multiple moves, then one up event) is a valid (and easily understood) selection, because pie menus ignore the position of the move events between down and up events, and are purely based on the direction between endpoints (which enables reselection).

Gesture recognition systems do not fully cover all possible gestures -- in fact most possible gestures are unrecognized syntax errors. But all pie menu gestures are valid selections, and it's very easy for the user to understand and control how a complex gesture will be interpreted (since it's simply based on direction between endpoints, as opposed to a complex gesture recognition system that interprets the path).

So pie menus are forgiving of mistakes and allowing of correction, in a way that gesture recognition systems are not. In fact, most possible gestures are syntax errors (while the boundaries between valid gestures are not necessarily comprehensible by the user), while all possible pie menu gestures are meaningful and comprehensible.

Reselection and menu display pre-emption is even nicer when the application can give immediate feedback in the form of a preview of the command that will happen when you release the button. The immediate in-app feedback mitigates the need to pop up a pie menu window immediately. Plus you can also use the distance between the cursor and menu center as a parameter, such as a font style/size selection menu that gives immediate feedback in the text it's changing. So you can just roll around the menu until the text looks the way you want, then release the button, without popping up the menu window.

Here's an example of pie menus with reselection and immediate feedback:

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/JavaScriptPieMenus.mov

And here is a video from around 1991 that demonstrates display pre-emption and light-weight immediate feedback:

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov

-Don Hopkins Xardox (talk) 14:06, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
 * --User:Diego Moya bows to the Master. 18:56, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Does not seem objective
The article largely reads like someone real excited about pie menus wrote it. If pie menus are so great, why don't we see them more? Obviously, pie menus are not able to show things lined up in columns. Pie menus seem OK in some cases, but hardly anything to be excited about. 71.212.54.210 (talk) 21:39, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Everything in the article is true and referenced. They have mayor drawbacks that impede their - mainly that they are only useful for a small number of items, that they are difficult to read, and that they're not integrated in common widget toolkits. These drawbacks should be detailed in the article. Diego (talk) 09:55, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Misc comments - Yura87 (talk) 10:28, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Early variants of Second Life, and some modern clients for it, implement pie menus. Beyond Good and Evil uses a spiral typing menu, not a "pie" one. A slice may be an applet rather than a menu entry or a sub-menu - Media Player slice in some (Logitech?) old mouse driver. Brutal Legend's spellcasting is a pie menu, as is Aquaria's Circle (and Magicka's element picker, if in gamepad mode)

The Usage section
I made some edits to the Usage section to make it more descriptive, I think it is better than before, but I haven't found any extra references for it. It might need more attention later. --Zhaoyebai (talk) 07:48, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Planned Revision of the Usage Section
Hello everyone!

The usage section has been flagged as being written like an essay, and while the content within it is solid, I think it could do with some rewording to keep it away from the essay style. I also think that the notable implementations section could also be reworded. I intend to carry out these edits in the next few weeks, and will workshop them on my own end so things shouldn’t be too incremental in the meantime. Just wanted to say hi and inform of my intentions, please feel free if you have any recommendations or if you object to these proposed edits. Thanks! GooglyEyedRock (talk) 17:34, 20 February 2023 (UTC)