[DonHopkins]

Agreed! ;)

I know you're joking about "ONLY", but actually, linear drop-down menus are just an edge case of pie menus with multiple items in only one direction: down. So you can also make drop-down, -up, -left, -right, and other direction menus with a decent pie menu editor, like the Blender pie menu editor add-on.

Pie menus are much more useful if users can edit and create their own, especially in feature-rich extensible configurable applications that different people use in different ways like Gimp and Blender.

Blender has great pie menu support, and there's a nice pie menu editor add-on, but it really needs a built-in WYSIWYG pie menu editor, supporting on-the-fly direct manipulation WYSIWYG drag-and-drop pie menu editing, like Simon Schneegans's brilliant Gnome-Pie and Fly-Pie.

By "direct manipulation WYSIWYG drag-and-drop" I mean that ideally you should be able to put any existing menu into edit mode on the fly, and edit the circular pie, linear, or hybrid layout directly by dragging items around to different slices, instead of with an indirect linear scrolling list or outline in a separate window.

You need to be able directly and immediately edit them as they will appear to the user, not as some abstract linear tree outline (or god forbid, raw xml).

Pie Menu Development for Blender:

https://devtalk.blender.org/t/pie-menu-development-for-blend...

Blender Pie Menu Editor:

https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor

Gnome-Pie (wikipedia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome-Pie

Gnome-Pie (github):

https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie

Gnome-Pie 0.6.1:

https://vimeo.com/125339537

Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs

Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk

And Simon's new project, Kando:

Kando - An Open Source, Cross-Platform Pie Menu:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdfnUDMO9k

Follow and support the project on Ko-Fi:

https://ko-fi.com/schneegans

Kando on GitHub:

https://github.com/kando-menu/kando

I also love the beautiful Trace and Coral menus he designed for his Bachelor thesis 11 years ago:

https://schneegans.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor-thesis

The Trace-Menu:

https://vimeo.com/51073078

The Coral-Menu:

https://vimeo.com/51072812

More of his great stuff:

https://schneegans.github.io/

A retrospective of my 35 years of work with pie menus:

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (2018):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

>Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked: “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”

>On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”

>I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.

>But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!) Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!

The ideas behind pie menus have actually been around for even longer than that, since at least 1969:

Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

>Dedication and Thanks to: Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471. David Chapman, Cambridge University Library. Remixing and Synchronization with AfterEffects by Don Hopkins.

>This film demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. It was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled “PIXIE: a new approach to graphical man-machine communication” presented at the 1969 CAD Conference held in Southampton.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html

PIXIE ran on a PDP-7 with a Type 340 CRT vector display with a light pen, networked with the Titan at Cambridge University, and was one of the earliest examples of a network distributed gui application, developed by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, and John O. Hiles.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/people/neilw.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7

David S H Rosenthal: Kids Today Have No Idea:

https://blog.dshr.org/2018/11/kids-today-have-no-idea.html

[_c3ag]

i'm tweaking with fly-pie (already got 2 menus that i use a lot [there's even a dedicated key when keyboard is at mouse-layer]) & i got the blender extension too...

i think there's so much potential to trackball gestures. have you thought about multiple commands at the same direction based on distance? (could be useful for setting the volume/brightness, for example)

[DonHopkins]

Awesome! I'm really looking forward to Simon implementing all the features of Fly-Pie across different platforms including Window, Linux and Mac desktops. Please support his great work on Ko-Fi if you can!

https://ko-fi.com/schneegans

But until such a day as Fly-Pie-like features and editors are built into every desktop and application and browser user interface toolkit, I do think Blender also requires its own specialized WYSIWYG pie menu editor that knows about Blender's command and input systems and user interface capabilities. But it should be inspired by Simon's work on Gnome-Pie, Fly-Pie, and Kando. Also drawing 3D pie menu items and animated feedback would be really cool and useful, so you can easily make pie menus of 3D Blender content, like a tree-structured clipboards or asset libraries, or live iconic previews of the effects of editing commands!

All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much more open to entertaining other people's ideas and contributions about user interface design than the Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public). At least Blender already supports pie menus well, and changed the default mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it would be much easier to just add a great image editor to Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to change the minds of the Gimp developers.

I love the capabilities of the current Blender pie menu editor add-on, since it supports linear menus and user interface dialogs as well (even embedding them in pie menus, to make hybrid layouts). But it doesn't support WYSIWYG editing, or on-the-fly editing of menus in place (like HyperCard) without using a dialog in another window and using a linear list or outline to represent radial layout, which is very confusing and hard to use.

The first approach I took to pie menus was to represent pie menus as containing items, and then lay the items out in a circle, starting at an initial angle (typically up), and in a particular direction (either clockwise or counter clockwise). But that has its problems, when it comes to editing, and supporting other than one item per direction.

So I've taken a different approach of pie menus containing slices, and slices containing items. So to create a pie menu, first you define how many slices you want, then you add zero or more items to each slice, by dragging and dropping them in. So the directions do not all change around when you add or remove an item, and you can leave empty slices, and you can also put multiple items in any slice.

Each slice can be configured with various layout and tracking and drawing policies.

One useful policy is a "pull-out" slice that dislays one item at once (like a font size), which changes as you pull out, switching between items by the distance. And the items can be discrete (like a linear menu of font faces) or continuous (like an exact floating point font size).

Another policy is show all the items in the slice layed out in the slice direction, like a linear menu. That lets you make a linear menu by simply using one slice that points down, and putting multiple items in it. Of course long text labels only work well in the up and down directions, but icons work nicely along the horizontal and diagonal directions, and you can display the selected text label in the menu center when its icon is selected, as feedback.

This shows several kinds of pull out pie menus, for selecting fonts and colors:

Just the Pie Menus from All the Widgets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE

This shows an experiment in exaggerating the increased precision of direction that you get by moving the cursor away from the menu center:

Precision Pie Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c

>This is a demonstration of the precision pie menu under the NeWS window system. It's an experiment in exaggerating the extra precision that you get with distance as you move out further from the menu center of a pie menu. Normally the further you go from the center the more control you have over the angle, but if you want to input an exact number like an angle you might want to get it down to the a certain number. But you run out of screen space before you get enough leverage to change the number to what you want. Now what happens here is that when you poke out, it makes a flexible lever that the further out you go the more flexible it becomes, and you have much finer control over the number. So as I move around back in and out I'll poke it into a different place and just come out further to get a lot of leverage and dial exactly the number I want. So here's what happens when you go around to the other side. *POP* And as you get nearer it gets less and less flexible. Generally you kind of eyeball it and then get it exact like 93: well there's 93, or 273: there's 273.

[_c3ag]

> Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public)

first thing that pops is a phrase of some biologist regards why evolution made plants green and not blue (physically, blue can absorb way more energy from the sun)... SPOILER: because makes the plantae organisms way more stable rather than performant (which opens up less windows for failings regards evolution). i use Gimp for digital collages, dead simple pixel-art and even composing a poem book for my beloved one! and that tool if it isn't perfect for the job, is probably about adjusting expectations ¶ why society can't re-signify a offensive word?

we have Krita (i never used) too... Gimp with its core open (viva the GNU license)... who knows how a bunch of hackers doing stuff for free feel when some fancy hipster smelling proprietary apple juice appears suggesting UX re-write (just in case i didn't even read the blog) based on what the rotten industry ⟨most of the time, rot⟩ wants! --cheers to a more slow paced and thoughtful world, by the way

i think pie-menus also should add a keyboard navigation. for me they are more than just controlling stuff with the pointer (interesting mailing list read about what Apple came after a research around 30 million of USD on UX: https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html ※ SPOILER: the mouse wins), but, again, for me radial-menus are much more than using the pointer but rather a sweet visualization, too.

different keys on hold for different functions when selecting a pie-menu direction etc. the sky isn't the limit anymore - also some thoughtful consideration where the mouse should be transported (if at all) when opening certain menus?

[DonHopkins]

Sorry, but the number of people who have seen Pulp Fiction, plus the number of people who know derogatory terms for disabled people, is much greater than the number of people who know technical biological terms of art.

If the GIMP developers really want to score an edgy rhetorical point about how society should get over its uptight wokeness and let them use any word they want whenever they want, and that's the hill they choose to die on, then how about they go all in, and try convincing society to re-signify the n-word by using it IN ALL UPPER CASE as the name of a hard-to-use paint program with an overly complex incomprehensible user interface for TempleOS, then come back to me after a few years and let me know how well that went.

Prejudice by Tim Minchin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw

At least the Blender developers finally listened to reason, admitted they made a mistake, and switched the left and right mouse button behavior, which wasn't nearly as offensive to as many people as "GIMP", whose name makes it kind of hard to evangelize around the school or office without coming off like a flaming MAGA asshole.

Donald Trump appears to mock a reporter's disability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLfkhxIH5Q

By stubbornly refusing to change the name, the Gimp developers have lost the right to whine and feel sorry for themselves about how unpopular it is and how nobody takes them seriously. Because in the intervening 25 years since 1998, 4chan and GamerGate and MAGA and Q-Anon and January 6 and Elon Musk have kind of spoiled the coolness and originality of that rebellious "edgelord" attitude.

If you have to explain to people, "I'm not really ableist, but I am simply participating in performance art to resignify a derogatory slang term for handicapped people or submissive S&M sex slaves as the name of a paint program!" you have already lost them.