[Sugar-devel] [Design] Resume/New pie menu menu mockup

[Mathieu Bridon]

Hi Gary,

On 07/10/2010 07:15 PM, Gary C Martin wrote:
> Here's a mockup for Walter's previous pie menu suggestion (starting a new thread as Sascha though the last one was getting too long). Pie menus have some nice UI properties, but can also be difficult to get working right for all cases (I've tried not to cheat in the mockup). I'd consider this a more touch friendly layout than current palettes/hover-menus (something the fullscreen dialogue approach was also trying to take into account). The inner two choices appear instantly on click. The outer segments appear on delay hover, with a 90% alpha to help keep the user in context (though given our ongoing lack of compositing, solid fill might have to do). Rolling over a segment lights up its fill, the whole of each segment needs to accept hits.

That looks pretty nice, but something instantly comes to mind: when this 
pie menu is open, what if I realize I clicked on the wrong activity, and 
the one I wanted is now *under* the pie menu? Do I have to click outside 
so that the menu disappears, then I can finally open the pie menu for 
the activity I was interested in?

How about something like this:

                 o     x
              o     o /
             o       o - x
              o     o \
                 o     x

(yes, this is a poor ascii-art for the Sugar activity launcher :)

The circle of « o »'s represents the activities in the launcher, and 
when the rightmost one is clicked/hovered/..., then the recent items 
(the ones you have put in a pie chart, here represented by the « x »'s) 
appear in a semi-pie-menu (its orientation depending on where the 
corresponding activity is located on the circle). This way, the menu 
remains out of the way of launching another activity as an afterthought.

This could also help the « I had this document that I want to open again 
but I don't remember the pretty picture I have to click to open it » 
situation (although I'm not sure it is a common one, and the journal 
would help anyway).

What do you think?


-- 
Mathieu


PS: Sorry if this had already been suggested and dismissed, I haven't 
really been following this mailing-list recently.