Pie Menus by Don Hopkins

Here are some references to things I've written about pie menus:

• Pie Menu Video.
  Instructional demo of ActiveX pie menus, and demos of many different pie menus developed over 12 years.
• The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus.
  By Don Hopkins. Dr. Dobb's Journal, Dec. 1991. Lead article, user interface issue.
• The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines.
  By Don Hopkins. Proc. 1989 Usenix Graphics Conference, Monterey California.
• A Comparative Analysis of Pie Menu Performance.
  By Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman. Proc. CHI'88 conference, Washington D.C.
• Designing to Facilitate Browsing: a Look Back at the HyperTIES Workstation Browser.
  By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, and William Weiland. Hypermedia, V3 #2, 1991
• Directional Selection is Easy as Pie Menus!
  By Don Hopkins. ;login: The Usenix Association Newsletter, V12 #5, Sept. 1987

I've implemented pie menus several times, for various window systems, projects, and products:

• The first X10 pie menu proof of concept prototype, written in C on a Sun 3/160. Convinced Professor Mark Weiser that I should divert my time from system administration to researching user interfaces. Convinced Jack Callahan, who was taking Ben Shneiderman's human factors class, to do a project comparing pie menus and linear menus, which I helped him implement.
• Pie menu extension to X10 uwm "ultrix window manager". There was no toolkit for X10 at the time, so I extended the X10 "uwm" window manager to implement pie menus as well as its normal pop up linear menus. You could define your own trees of nested menus, and bind them to window management commands, run programs, etc. You could specify that any menu was linear or pie, and it supported nested menus, mouse ahead, display supression, and carefully addressed the screen edge boundary condition and mouse warping problems (which is tricky with an asynchronous protocol like X).
• Forth programmable pie menu window manager. I integrated the pie-menuified "uwm" into Mitch Bradley's Sun Forth, to perform the experiment for Jack Callahan's SIGCHI paper. The paper's available here: callahan.ps.
• I made my first multithreaded programmable pie menu window manager, by breaking open the inner loop of the C window manager, linking it into Mitch Bradley's great 68000 Sun Forth, and writing code in Forth that could create and pop up menus, track the mouse, and call into and delegate events to the uwm code.
• We used it to administer, time, and record statistics for the experiment we did, comparing pie menus and linear menus. At one point, I wrote code that would let you throw a window and it would bounce around the screen, by starting a Forth thread that pushed it around. You could have a whole bunch of windows boucing around the screen and frantically repainting at once! I can't believe how well it performed on a little Sun 3/160, compared to how slow and bloated computers are today.
• This multitasking Forth programmable window manager forshadowed my work with NeWS, a window manager programmable in multithreaded PostScript, another stack based language. Mike Gallaher and I went to visit Sun, and I read the Red PostScript book on the plane. I met the likes of Gilmore, Gosling, Rosenthal, Densmore, and Bradley (who later hired me as a summer intern), and finally saw and promptly crashed my first NeWS server (then called SunDew).
• PostScript code to print pie menus on an Apple LaserWriter. After implementing ugly pie menus in X10, I experimented with many different graphical styles, using PostScript. But all I had was the Apple LaserWriter in the terminal room. I wrote my own object oriented system using nested dictionaries to represent nested two dimensional pie menus, with multiple rings of graphical items. This foreshadowed my work programming NeWS, with Owen Densmore's object oriented PostScript system. By the time I read Owen's Usenet Graphics Conference paper, with its one page listing of class.ps, I had already been working on the same problem myself on the LaserWriter to print nested graphics with inherited characteristics, so I was quite excited to get NeWS and make interactive pie menus on the screen instead of drawing them on paper.
• NeWS pie menus, written in object oriented PostScript, with the Lite toolkit. I designed, implemented, used, and re-implemented many classes and subclasses of pie menus for NeWS 1.0, 1.1, SGI's 4Sight, and Grasshopper's MacNeWS. I developed a nice efficient pie menu based window manager, as well as "tab windows", windows with tabs sticking out of them, that you could use to easily pop up pie menus and move and organize the windows. I worked on UniPress Emacs, rewriting the NeWS display driver, and integrating pie menus and tab windows into it, including an automatic menu compiler that translated "hypertext" Info trees into corresponding trees of pie menus bound to emacs commands. This was the first version of emacs to support multiple windows, so the convenient tab windows and pie menus helped a lot when you had lots of windows opened.
• I wrote a special subclass of pie menus for the SGI 4Sight version of NeWS, since 4Sight did not support popup windows with "SaveBehind", because it couldn't read pixels back from the screen efficiently. Instead, its own special SGI style NeWS menus popped up in the hardware overlay plane! So I put the necessary hooks into the core pie menu class, so I could write a subclass for the SGI that popped them up in the overlay plane. The only problem was with the rainbow color wheel pie menu, because you could only have black, white, and one other color in the overlay. So I made a special instance variable just to override the overlay behavior, which the color wheel menu set, so it could pop up in the color framebuffer, but still know enough about the overlay plane to punch a hole in the overlay so the other menus did not appear to overlap it!
• Pie menus and tab windows for the NeWS Development Environment (NDE 1.0), on OpenWindows 1.0. I wrote pie menus and tab windows from scratch on top of an early version of this big, new, complex, object oriented PostScript toolkit for NeWS, written by Sun. It was actually possible to manage X11 windows with NeWS tab windows and pie menus, because the X11 window manager was written in NeWS, and used the default NDE window frame, which I could customize and override. NeWS Development Environment (NDE 1.0) was eventually completely rewritten and renamed "The NeWS Toolkit".
• Pie menus and tab windows for The NeWS Toolkit. When I graduated, I went to work for Sun on TNT, The NeWS Toolkit, for OpenWindows 2.0. TNT was loosely based on NDE, also written in object oriented PostScript, but it was twice the speed and half the size. Of course, I wrote pie menus and tab windows from scratch again for TNT, and continued to improve on the user interface, this time adding spinning pop-up animation, and air-tight synchronous mouse tracking (which is possible to do with NeWS but not with X11). The source code is available somewhere. [NOTE: make a link here]
• Talking pie menus in SimCity for HyperLook. I ported SimCity to Unix, reimplementing the user interface using the HyperLook environment on NeWS, a product that I was concurrently developing at the Turing Institute in Glasgow with Arthur van Hoff. SimCity for HyperLook was a really fun project to work on, but it's hard to describe in words, and you really have to see it to believe it. I used the TNT pie menus for selecting city editing tools, a task that you do all the time when editing the map. They spoke the name of the selected tool, so you knew you had the right tool even if you flicked the mouse so fast that the pie menu wasn't displayed.
• The "piewm" X11 window manager with pie menus. When I was a research programmer at CMU, faced with using X11, I realized that I needed pie menus to help me move my windows around, so I went shopping around for a reasonable window manager, and since there weren't any, I choose the least unreasonable one at the time, "tvtwm", and hacked it up with an updated version of the old X10 "uwm" pie menus, and called it "piewm". The source code is available here: piewm.tar.Z.
• The TCL/Tk pie menu widget. I accidentally ported the HyperLook version of SimCity to X11, making it multi player in the process, using the TCL/Tk toolkit, which was the only X11 toolkit that didn't suck. I needed some fancy looking graphical pie menus, so I made a TCL/Tk pie menu widget, whose window shape could be shrink-wrapped around iconic labels. The source code is available here: tkpie.tar.gz. I recorded an X11 SimCity demo, showing pie menus in action. SimCity for X11 won a "best product of 1992" award from Unix World!
• The ScriptX pie menu. I worked at Kaleida and wrote all kinds of stuff in ScriptX, so of course one of those things was a pie menu. I used it in a couple obscure places in the DreamScape demo.
• ActiveX pie menu component. I wrote a pie menu OLE component, now known as ActiveX. With Internet Explorer, you can put it on a web page, and program it in JavaScript or Visual Basic Script. Wheeee. It has a property sheet that lets you type an indented outline of menu items into a multi line text editor. It's much simpler to configure a nested tree of menus this way than trying to use some fancy tree editor with lots of buttons and scroll bars and text fields.

Other stuff I should mention some time:

• The intense discussions and bong hits with Mike Gallaher that inspired my research.
• Mark Weiser's pie menu in his "SDI" game for SunView.
• The pie versus linear menu experiment and SIGCHI paper that Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman and I wrote.
• A description of the Forth window manager that I developed to perform the experiment.
• The story of giving Steve Jobs a pie menu demo. "That sucks! That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat! That sucks!"
• My pseudoscientific psiber pie menu performance at Empowered, CHI '90.
• The Momenta(ry) pen computer, with its patented 5-item "command compass". (Doh!)
• Return to Zork has animated graphical drag and drop pie menus.
• Alias, the high end SGI 3D tool, has user definable "marking menus".
• The Japanese version of Habitat had pie menus to trigger actions of your avitar like wave, bow, jump, etc.