Welcome to Pie Menu Central!

What Are Pie Menus?

From the Game Programming Gems 3 chapter titled "Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus":
"Pie menus are a naturally efficient user-interface technique -- directional selection of pie slice-shaped targets. The cursor starts out in the inactive center region of a pie, and all target slices are large, nearby, and in different directions. Pie menus are quite easy for new users. You simple follow the pop-up directions to use them. They are also extremely efficient for experienced users. Once you know the directions, you can quickly and reliably 'mouse ahead' without looking. Fitts' Law explains the pie menu advantage -- their fast selection speed and low error rate is due to their large target size and the small distance between each item."
Section Topics: The Feng GUI of Pie Menus, Researching and Evaluating Pie Menus, Plugging in Pie Menus, Future Directions, Going to Town with SimCity, Living at Home with The Sims.

I'm in the process of migrating the pie menu stuff from this site and lots of new stuff into the Drupal content management system that I'm using for my blog. As soon as I've moved everything from this site into Drupal, I'll switch this site over to run Drupal, but until then there's still some stuff here that I haven't migrated yet.

Pie Menu Implementations

Mozilla is the open source web browser, which now supports pie menus! (As thrashed to death on SlashDot.) Thanks to the Mozilla developers for their great work!
JavaScript Pie Menus are free for Internet Explorer on Windows. You can try out the many demos and download the free open source code for this reusable "Dynamic HTML Behavior Component". They're easily configured with XML or scripting languages, and rendered with Dynamic HTML.
ActiveX Pie Menus plug into Internet Explorer, Visual Basic, Visual C++, or any other ActiveX component container. They're implemented in C++ as an OLE Control for Windows, and distributed as a downloadable binary plug-in ActiveX component, The free open souce code is also available for download. You can easily create and configure ActiveX pie menus with a set of property sheets in user interface authoring mode, and also programmatically from scripting languages like JavaScript.

Pie Menu Demos

The Pie Menu Video Server broadcasts free streaming QuickTime movies of pie menu research and applications developed by Don Hopkins: The Sims, Multi Player SimCity, Linux SimCity, ActiveX, Internet Explorer, The NeWS Toolkit, NeWS, X-Windows, and many other talks and demos.
Fasteroids is a free game that lets you compare pie menus with linear menus. Take the pie menu challange! Fasteroids tracks your selection speed and error rate, so you can compare pie menus and linear menus for yourself.
ActiveX Pie Menu Demos: Examples of ActiveX pie menus on a web page.
ActiveX Pie Menu Editor: Edit the properties of an ActiveX pie menu on a web page.

Pie Menu Articles

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus: Dr. Dobb's Journal (Dec 1991 lead article, cover story, user interface issue), by Don Hopkins.
The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines: The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS. by Don Hopkins.
Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus: Notes and additional information from Don's Oct 13 '98 BayCHI talk.
A Description of ActiveX Pie Menus: A brief illustrated introduction to pie menus, with an overview of ActiveX pie menu features.
ActiveX Pie Menu Instructions: How to choose with pie menus. Describes the ActiveX pie menu implementation.
ActiveX Pie Menu Documentation: Documentation for the ActiveX pie menu control: integrating, programming, properties, methods, and events.
Pie Menu References: Pointers to online documentation, papers, software, and people working with pie menus.
Pie Menus by Don Hopkins: Summary of Don Hopkins' work researching and developing pie menus.
Please Read the Fine Print.

Pie Menu Applications

ConnectedTV is an online service and Palm application that functions as a universal remote control with integrated personalized TV guide, spam filtering and intelligent categorization. The interface is designed so you can hold it in one hand and easily operate it with your thumb or finger. ConnectedTV features pie menus: a fun, fast and reliable selection technique that you can do with your fingers.
The Sims is the award winning game from Maxis, that lets you control the lives of virtual people, with pie menus.