UI Suggestion: Dynamic pie menus

The pie menus are lovely, but in my opinion, they could use a little work -- the "acquire object" and "detach object" menus in particular are problematic.

My suggestion? Don't use pre-rendered bitmaps, (or do -- you could still do all this anyway {1}) instead, have nested menus that radiate out from the centre point, rather than sticking us with "More" or "Back" as menu option.

Menus would be generated according to how many options there were to pick from -- if only 3 things could be done with a selection, then you'd get a 3-cell menu.

The attached image is just a quick 5-minute mockup, but it shows different menu layers and how they'd pop out when you moved the mouse pointer over them. (Not all at once, of course, just where the pointer happened to be.) Tooltips (if necessary) could appear in the centre of the ring.

This is only a two-ring menu, but that's all we'd need anyway! With only a six-cell inner (and outer) menu, that gives us anywhere between 6 and 36 possible options in two levels. With a six-cell inner ring and a 12-cell outer ring, well, you get the idea.

Replacing drop-down menus with a different type of interface widget is only useful when you at least retain the functionality of the original. A dynamically-generated, threaded pop-up menuing system does that, while adding additional functionality and looking cool and distinctive to boot.

Thoughts?
Catherine Omega

Heh, upon reviewing my post, I just noticed that I seem to have subconciously ripped Mike Okuda off rather badly with my colour scheme. Not intentional, I assure you. It's a false-colour image anyway.

CΩ

Note that if this is implemented properly, it leads to highly efficent "mouse-gestures", a la the Opera web browser or the game Black&White.

That is: right-click, move the mouse in a pattern, release.

A girl making a star trek joke? Marry me!

Holy cats. I would totally mark out for gesture recognition in SL.

(that's a good thing)

Mouse gestures are fine, but before we go any furthur with it, we have to establish one thing for future reference -- NEVER have a mouse gesture for something that you can't also accomplish via other means. I hated that about Black and White. They aren't always that easy to pull off, especially for those of us who prefer trackballs.

Wednesday:
Exactly. In addition to promoting ease-of-discussion, ("oh, that? yeah, it's at 10 o'clock in editing mode" this would also be REALLY easy to pick up, because of the way we recognize patterns. It's also highly convenient, since you don't have to move the mouse pointer all over the screen to get to your menus. (as in a traditional nested drop-down list... just look at our "Track Users" or "landmark" controls!)

Johnathan:
Heh, you can't begin to guess how frequently I get that.

CΩ

I don't know if anyone has thought of this, but as long as the menus are going to be dynamic, we could add our own menu options for an object via the script. Establish the menu item labels and event handlers for when they are clicked. We could also establish the 'default' click event for when we simply click on the object like we do now. If none is decared to be default, then would simply be the first one defined in the code.

That's a damn good point.

Just as an aside, 50% of the time that I am using Opera mouse gestures, it is with a trackball, and I have never had a finger snap off or explode, as other people report. Of course my trackball is thumb-controlled, maybe it's different for the finger controlled ones.

lol
if your finger *does* snap off or explode, please post a pic.

I'm pretty sure you can use gestures, you just have to figure out where everything is. Next time you see someone you want to trade cards with just do a quick drag click down thier body.

Of course, noew that we have things like 8 attachment pints in the head alone, there are gonna be some pretty complex mousewaggling.

BBC

I really like this idea (dynamic menus). Especially if some current windows could be replaced by it. For example, the rate window could just be a dynamic submenu that pops up with the three options. The pay button could pop up a menu with choices for $1, $5 etc. and "Other" which would pop up a window. Even 'edit' could pop up some menu options like 'move', 'stretch' and 'rotate'.

Also I really like the idea that options that aren't available aren't just greyed out, but don't even show up. Could really clean some menus up.