In the current (July 1997) issue of Scientific American, there's a
section on computers and why they aren't so hot. (The article can be
found on the web at
http://www.sciam.com/0797issue/0797trends.html,
the bit I'm going to refer to can be found at
http://www.sciam.com/0797issue/0797trendsbox2.html
although it doesn't have any of the illustrations.)
Usability research has shown, apparently, that pie-shaped menus work
better than the ones we all have now. There's a picture in the
magazine of a circular menu, with a central button, buttons radiating
out to the left, and various buttons and glyphs on the right. "They
are 30 per cent faster and have half the error rates of menu bars,"
someone called Schneiderman says. "We remember angles so much better
than distances," Ted Selker says (there's a link to his home page on
the SA web site).
It makes sense to me. Right now, with pull-down menus, you have to be
careful about how far you go down, and everyone I know is always
watching the menus to make sure they go down just the right amount.
Last weekend I was fooling around with fvwm and quit out of it twice,
when all I'd wanted to do was restart it - the two options are very
close in my menu. If I could go "click - whoosh it left and up -
click" or "click - straight down for Emacs - click," I think I'd get
used to the angles very quickly.
I'm wondering, how hard would it be to do a module that would let
people create pie menus? I assume it *can* be done, but I don't know
anything about X programming, so I have no idea how tough it is.
Beyond that, of course, someone would have to do it, but I'm hoping
the idea might intrigue someone. :)
Bill
--
William Denton | Toronto, Canada | http://www.vex.net/~buff/ | Caveat lector.
"It is better to incur a mild rebuke than to perform an onerous task."
-- "Uncle" Oswald Hendryks Cornelius
--
Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL:http://www.hpc.uh.edu/fvwm/>.
To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm" in the body of a
message to majordomo_at_hpc.uh.edu.
To report problems, send mail to fvwm-owner_at_hpc.uh.edu.
Received on Wed Jul 09 1997 - 18:56:30 BST