[Bf-funboard] Blender Pie Menus Prototype Addon

[Alberto Torres]

2013/1/29 Sean Olson <seanolson at gmail.com>

> I would argue that #1 is the greater evil, since it
> greatly interfers with "muscle memory".
>

I don't think it's an issue for two options that are always mutually
exclusive. For example, ctrl+tab is weight painting/object mode when a mesh
is selected, and pose mode when an armature is selected. I used them a lot
and doesn't interfere with muscle memory.

I'm not really following how you are saying this should functionally work.
>  Perhaps a mockup?
>

The one posted earlier would work very well:

2013/1/28 Matjaz Lamut <matjaz.lamut at gmail.com>

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1482587/Blender%20UI/Radials-mockup.png
>

But if it's difficult to fit the text, I would put only the icons and then
the text floating next to the icons, in the opposite side of the mouse. The
active area would be then the icons and not the text.

Here was our logic -
> the left/right angles are much much much easier to hit than
> the diagonal angles.


While that's right, the left/right angle in most cases is not really
straight. My aim seems to be rotated ~20°. And it's not *that* much easier,
because...

 I know everybody is different, but this
> solution made the diagonal pie slices bearable to hit,


Bearable to *click*. It shoudln't be necessary to hit it when you're moving
to an imprecise direction. The problem was the difference between the
visual position of the menu and the active area. If you didn't pay
attention to the position, it wasn't a problem.

I used Second Life for a year or so, back when they had pie menus. The UI
is awful, slow and completely unintuitive, but it had some bits of good
ideas scattered in it. One of them were the pie menus. I noticed that when
pushing the mouse button the menu had an appearance (with the outer borders
blurred, like they were infinite) and releasing the button changes that
border to a solid one. I discovered I could make a click-drag-release
gesture because of that difference between mousedown/mouseup. It would be
better if it had a tooltip saying "you can select an option hovering in its
direction" while the button is pressed. People would notice it and hold the
button to read it.

IIRC my most frequent options were down-right (for edit) and right (for
profile). Most of the time I would select the options even before the menu
was drawn in the screen. The areas were all the same size.

Not sure if you noticed the Pie Menus tab in the "N" properties panel.


Nice to know, but I would want pie menus always enabled and sometimes I
want to change between two modes very quickly. Well, that's not very
important, but consider it a feature request.

Cheers!

DiThi