Shrinking Pie Menu poll

This poll asks about one's view of the shrinking pie menu.







------ Please do not feed the troll, ok y'all? --------- Please? --------

only when i go swimming

Why not get to fixing the BUGS and not tweaky little things to the UI!! Sheesh

Incidentally, I did not include a pie option in this poll because I felt it was superfluous and might confuse the matter.

I picked neutral. I don't see any harm in it but also think it COULD get anoying to some people. The first time i saw it, i thought it was a graphic bug hehe.

I'm neutral on this too. It feels like something was programmed for the sake of programming it. It doesn't really add anything to the interface. Sure it's eye candy, but the entirety of SL is eye candy to a far greater degree (at least once the grahics have loaded). This kind of eye candy is wasted when there is much greater eye candy right behind it.

Couldn't have said it better

Bells and whistles are very nice things to look at when you cant actually do anything because other things are broken.

You know, it LOOKS great, the issue I have is that when I right click something, the menu starts to shrink, and then just plain dissapears. I have to click about 47 times, and still it dissapears.

It's impossible to click things sometimes, does anyone else have this problem?

It's not eye candy.

It's meant to create a different look for the two operational modes of the pie menu:

1. 'Normal' pie menu mode:
Right click and release the mouse button. Only the clearly bordered menu options can be selected, moving the mouse out of this area and clicking will cancel the menu.

2. 'Gesture' mode
Right click and HOLD the mouse button (pie menu is now the faded menu), the WHOLE SCREEN functions as pie menu, and you can select any option by just dragging that mouse in the arc defined by the menu option. This is meant to be able to do 'mouse gestures', like in e.g. firefox. For instance: right click, left gesture is a 'take'.


IMHO this should be toggleable, as canceling the gesture mode is quite tricky (either move your mouse back in the center of the pie menu and release button, or move it to one of the empty pie parts)

Is that all? I consider it a *BUG*. I right click stuff, and the results are unpredictable. With the way this is designed, only the slightest movement of the mouse is necessary to activate a menu on the pie. A slight movement is enough to even delete an item!

Oh, so that's what the gesture command is meant to be? btw, is that also how gestures work in Firefox, because I can't find the gesture controls in that either.

Perhaps SL needs better documentation?

When i first heard about the gesture pie menu i thought it was the obvious. A pie menu that lists your active gestures and allows you to play them. O.o But i was wrong.

I love pie. Blueberry is the best kind, and anyone who disagrees is an ignorant troll and should be banned!

You are correct that the shrinking pie menu is not eye candy. Eye candy would need to look good. The shrinking effect looks bad.

There is no utility to the shrinking effect. The shrinking effect does not convey any useful information or perform any function at all.

The unneeded explanation of the gestual pie menu mode suggests that opposition to the shrinking pie menu is somehow based on ignorance of the new gestural menu's operation. This is misleading. I am quite aware of the gestural pie menu and how to use it; but I loathe the shrinking pie menu effect.

Eye garbage might be a better description than eye candy.

i never noticed the shrinking menu effect. but i love the "gestural" thing and think it makes great use of fitt's law. i just haven't been remembering to keep the mouse button down to take advantage of it, since my fingers are so trained to clicka nd release.

Are you able to tell that the menu starts at one size and shrinks if you choose to use the old method of right clicking and letting off ?

Personally, I find the pie menu itself to be a silly and inefficient design. Sure, its cute. But a pie menu profides no additional functionality. It is less intuitive, not more intuitive. It arbitrarily constrains the addition of new and useful functionality because more items simply do not fit (without a cascading series of More selections). I would love to see Linden Lab get rid of the pie menu altogether. They to not need to make it cuter.

I would have loved to participate in this poll, but I haven't got a clue as to what you all are talking about.

Anything that has happened since 5pm Tues, is all a blur to me. Have to read about it in forums to know whats going on in game so when I FINALLY get back, I have SOMEWHAT \of a clue.

Ok sry...I will stop venting about MY dumb issue...

TC,
Lilly

I don't like the new pie behavior. I've noticed a very large increase in the number of mis-clicks on my part; things are just harder to select for some reason. I have twice offered friendship to someone instead of getting their profile -- I've never done that before. I've deleted instead of editing objects I'm working on.

Something changed other than the animation -- its much much more sensitive now.

EDIT: *Some negative banter of mine removed for community's sake*

First something to laugh about: Did they remove the flash from the snapshot and put it into the pie menu? I swear I get on the verge of an epileptic seizure every time I click on the pie menu and it does that weird strobey looking zoomey effect with a flash.


Here are bugs introduced in the last 2-3 updates: (tested on Powerbook 1.25Ghz, 2Gb RAM, Mac OX Tiger with T1 connection)
1-The menu bar has garbled text for World, and Debug .. the font looks all weird

2-The chat window is not acting right, the text types in slower than usual

3-When you right click/command click an object to edit, the edit window comes up and immediately the item you clicked gets deselected so you have to re-right click and select Edit from the pie menu. This happens 100% of the time on my machine and is annoying.

4-I lost ALL of my preset colors in my Edit Texture -> Edit Color interface, they've been all replaced with black. So now I will have to go back to my creations and repopulate this palette I have developed in the last year for shading things. Not a show stopper but annoying.

5-Keep losing my hair piece -- prim hair, when I tp, get pushed, fly through sim boundaries only to get it back a couple of minutes later sometimes, and sometimes never getting it back.

6-When editing, objects keep jumping around like crazy and ending up under land or at the edge of the sim -- This has been an ongoing problem with the edit tools when using the mouse but before at least the sim mini map would show you where the object is by highlighting it. Now the mini map does not update. I lost a coffee table for up to a week and was able to find it only when I flew around the sim and made wide drag and selects for my own objects. It was trapped underneath someone's no-return land.

7-If you have streaming music turned off and you go to Preferences, after you change preferences and close the pref window, your streaming music setting gets set to on. So suddenly Aerosmith start shouting in my ear after I close my pref window. Was not fun the first time.

8- Several objects created and donated by Richard Stern now can not be located on the asset server. Too bad in a fit of anger, I deleted them all from my inventory. I think what made them go kaput was the fact that they were all grouped inside these boxes he had left on his parcel. So most of the things inside those boxes produce the "inventory item not found" message when you try to rez the box and copy the items into your inventory. I have heard other people complain about this.

9-User written TP scripts get completely crazy right after the grid comes back up throwing avatars at oddest locations -- hanfway in the landmass, or drift them across three sims and then take them to the original spot they were meant to go.

10- My avatar is no longer returned to my sign on default location, now I find myself logging in where I left off. I am guessing something with the last update did a reset on this setting. Not a show stopper but annoying.

11- Everyone seems gaga over the new camera but I think it is complete caca for builders and people who sit in SL. I personally miss the old one. I can not get my camera's location right when I am trying to build something now. It is always going some wrong angle or zoom or impacting completely into an object and staying in it until I reset. I also hate the sit based camera angles. All it does is put the camera outside the build -- most chairs and couches are placed by the walls people, so if you position the camera way behind the avatar's head you're going to be putting the camera either in the room nextdoor or completely outside the building. Hmmmmm not fun.

11a- This has been around for a while. If you sit and then change your camera angle to zoom out for a wide angle view when you stand up your camera angle does not reset to your normal standing angle, it stays in wide angle until you reset it from the menu bar.

12-Newer avatars act extremely codependent and make everyone their Friend and message you within 5 minutes of logging into SL. Older avatars are reclusive, unhappy and bitchy -- and some even extremely full of themselves. Please fix their AI subroutines to make older avatars happier and humbler and newer avatars quiter and less stalkier. ;-p

The OP asks only about one issue, how you feel about the shrinking pie menu that occurs when you right click something then let off of the button.

I don't like the shrinking pie menu.

I wouldn't say I absolutely hate this. It isn't as bad by any stretch as the photo change or the bugs. On the other hand, it adds nothing of value and eats up more resources, so I can only give it negative marks.

Well, then i'm sorry for hijacking the thread. Remind me next time to post any stuff slightly related to the question, in a separate thread, to minimize the risk of annoying you with clarifications you personally already were aware of.

Next to that, I find the whole discussion about a single animation bothering people kind of petty. What really is important is the change in UI behaviour, which is causing people to make mistakes using the interface. The gestural behaviour is causing much more problems than the animation effects.

But to answer the question:

No, i don't think the shrinking effects add much to the user experience. I can understand why the animation behaviour is as it is atm. It's much harder to change the menu from the original pie shape to the gradient based pie shape after a certain timeout period (where people still have the mousebutton depressed) than it is to change it from the gradient based pie to the original pie menu on the mouse release event. Still, this would have been the more preferred way to handle it.

If I now would choose where to put development efforts for fixing bugs and annoyances, this change would be a low priority in my case though. Especially considering the work it is and the risks involved implementing the solution.

Changing it back to 'the old way' will be even more confusing, as this would mean that when holding the mousebutton depressed, the misleading suggestion would be given, that the pie menu only works in a specific area, and not the wholse screen. Although i think that the current gradient based solution doesn't effictively convey this message as it is.

Concerning the animation between the two states, I can't judge whether the effect would be less or more annoying with or without it, without actually experiencing both situations.