[opensource-dev] Open Viewer Development Announcement

[Tateru Nino]

On 20/08/2010 3:16 AM, Henri Beauchamp wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:04:21 -0400, Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence) wrote:
>
>>    On 2010-08-18 14:14, Aidan Thornton wrote:
>>> On 8/18/10, Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)<oz at lindenlab.com>   wrote:
>>>> While there were some good things about the v1 implementation of pie
>>>> menus, they also had some flaws - such as not opening a submenu centered
>>>> on the mouse click.
>>> I actually puzzled over this a bit when I first realised that Second
>>> Life's pie menus worked this way. Originally, the pie menus worked
>>> well when you didn't click too close to the edge of the screen but
>>> didn't actually open under the mouse cursor if you did. Since the
>>> "More..." item is sensibly always the southmost one, opening new
>>> submenus centered on the mouse would cause the pie menu to drift down
>>> the screen until it hit the bottom and caused problems.
>>>
>>> Also, opening the submenu at the same location has the nice
>>> side-effect that the mouse remains over the "More..." option for the
>>> pie menus that are nested 3 or more levels deep.
>>>
>>> What I have been contemplating is how to make it possible to open the
>>> next layer of a pie menu without moving the mouse at all. Sadly, it'd
>>> probably break too much from normal UI conventions to be worth doing.
>> If I understood him correctly, what Q seemed to think was the right
>> behavior is:
>>
>>      * The first mouse-down opens the pie centered on the mouse location,
>>        so no choice is under the mouse
>>      * If the choice is a submenu, each new menu is also centered on the
>>        mouse
>>
>> that way, you are never making a choice within the submenu if you
>> accidentally double click, because the center is never a choice.  this
>> does mean that the nested menus 'creep', but that has the effect that
>> each nested choice is a 'gesture-like' unique series of clicks.
> A smarter approach would be to automatically move the cursor itself to
> the center of the pie menu (without moving the latter to avoid an
> annoying "drifting" effect) when you click on a sub-menu.
>
> However, I never found the fact that the pie menu was not centered on
> the cursor after a click on a sub-menu item to be an hinderance, since
> the whole idea about pie menus is that you quickly get your "muscle
> memory" trained and don't even have to look at the menu any more after
> you are trained. For example, my "muscles know" that to delete an
> in-world object I must right click on it, then move south, left click
> (for "More>"), and move north east and left click again (for Delete).
> With the new method, I'd simply have to replace "north east" with
> "east" in my muscle memory (which would make me miss quite a number
> of clicks at first, since this memory has been trained and used for
> almost 4 years now, so if you reimplement pie-menus in this new way,
> I'd appreciate a debug option to prevent the auto-recentering of the
> cursor)...
For a while, I was somewhat spoiled by colour-coded, multi-layered 
concentric radial menus. A chance to preview the whole menu tree with a 
little mouse-wiggling before selecting an option.

A bit like this: 
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6C7jhrvrP14/SCIXQ0vvNFI/AAAAAAAAAJM/cCtvGNWR0co/s400/menu.png

-- 
Tateru Nino
http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/