Re: [Ayatana] Easy to use menus for touch and non touch devices

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 16:01, Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 11/03/2011 02:01 PM, Matt Richardson wrote:

It strikes me that the idea behind hiding the menus has been that for
people with touch devices these menus are not useful and future
applications should avoid the use of menus where possible.

What makes you think that would be the idea?

The panel menus in the top right suggests that menus as such are deemed OK. Add the Launcher hiding behavior and one must conclude that Unity as presented in 11.10 is not at all touch-friendly.

As an all round solution I suggest replacing the context menu with a
gnome pie menu which would contain the context menu items in the right
half, and the top menus as items in the left half.
For example:
Right clicking a blank space in Nautilus would bring up a pie in which
'Create New Folder', 'Create New Document' etc through to 'Properties',
would make up the right half of the pie and 'File', 'Edit', 'View' etc
through to 'Help' would make up the left half of the pie.

Pie menus must be designed to get the right number of items in the right places. Application menus vary wildly in the number and selection of top-level items.

Increasing the number of items exposed at once will increase the average time it takes to select a single item.

Though in general, I would love to see proper marking menus in Free Software.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtH9GdFSQaw
http://www.billbuxton.com/MMUserLearn.html
http://www.billbuxton.com/MMExpert.html

Autodesk did some work on multi-touch marking menus:
http://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/multitouchmm

now that's top material right there!

i had some designs with something i called "finger pies", but they never reached maturity, as i developed the concept on paper only and i didn't have time to complete it. Needless to say, it is important to adapt the computer's interface to natural human gestures and anatomy.

we have 5 fingers, so it's obvious that a pie menu with a max of 5 entries would be a place to start.

also do i not see, why it has to be a full circle, the fingers of the hand also don't shape a circle, which makes the designated model more half-circle like, an arc. And now we're quite close to what the above links about marking menus offer.. visually at least.

i'm excited about what else this thread will produce :D

thanks Matt, great inspiration!