Re: Links to Style Guides (Was Re: guessing, speculation, and opinion)

[Kai Wetzel <k wetzel welfen-netz com>]

Ben 'The Con Man' Kahn wrote:

[...]

>         A pie menu is a menu which is shaped like a circle.  The mouse
> pointer starts centered in the middle of the circle and the menu items are
> on the outside.  Like this:
> 
>               File
> 
>          Edit  .  Window
> 
>               Help

Are the items placed in rectengular boxes like
"normal menu" items ?

>         A lot of research has gone into these menus.  The company which
> makes Alias (now owned by SGI I believe) did a lot of research into them.
> (They have a very active UI testing center.)  A lot of research has gone
> into the number of menu items can go into a menu at any one time, the
> effects of dynamic menu items on the menus, user memory, etc.

>From an Alias | Wavefront presentation I saw about a year
ago it seems that their interfaces are fairly visually
pleasing.  Have they found a beauty way of drawing pie menus ?
>From earlier posts I have concluded that there is at least
one implementation which shows their power but is rather ugly (?).
 
>         Often a line is drawn to the menu item currently being selected,
> and submenus are drawn in the NEW center.

How do you go back to the parent pie menu ?

> I may be be explaining it very well, but I'll look for some links.
> 
>         Speaking of which, we may want to look at OTHER Alias research.
> They have done some interesting things with transparent or translucent
> windows/menus.

Sounds interesting.  I have heard the Berlin project is going
to use OpenGL for their window system (?) which would allow such
a feature (transluciency).  Did Alias publish some of their
findings on the net ?

[links]

Thanks for the links.  As happened to be a request for
GUI and style guide links on the Linux Interface
Project list a few hours ago, I'll cite your URLs
on that list.

Best regards,
kai