Mike Austin's Blog

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Hybrid context menu

I've been writing a kind of vector ui designer in Dylan, and I recently gave a little thought into the use of context menus. Linear menus are ok when you have 5-7 items, but more than that or use of sub-menus makes it hard to use. Regular 'pie menus' are nice when they have a few options, and enable a kind of mouse gesturing, but quickly loose their advantages when more options are needed. Also, I don't like how sub-pie-menus cover up the previous menu in some implementations. So, I've designed a hybrid menu that makes use radial space, but uses regular linear menus for the outside items. It's a bit big, but I'll see how it works out when I implement it. An example implementation of pie-menus can be found here: Java Pie Menus