Le mar 09/04/2002 à 15:42, Sven Neumann a écrit : > - Four direction menus to reduce mouse movements necessary to > reach a certain menu entry. I'm not sure if I understood this > correctly. Someone should draw some Ascii art to illustrate > this. I don't like the idea. I've seen this on a number of graphics packages (Maya for example) and it does work quite well. The idea is that when you Right-click in the image to pop up the menu, instead of having just one honking great list of stuff, you split that menu into a number of catagories (4 or 8 typically) and scatter those catagories as little icons or perhaps text labels in a ring around the mouse pointer. Moving the mouse a short distance in the requisite direction pops up either a new (short) menu - or (more likely), drops you into a new ring of catagories. Releasing the mouse activates whatever thing the mouse is over at the time in the usual way. The idea is that a right-click followed by a short (and easily memorized) "gesture" gets you to the menu item you want in less time than scrolling down that l-o-n-g menu. It's pretty logical actually. Encoding the function you want as a 1 dimensional list requires EITHER tiny fonts and accurate mouse positioning OR large fonts and huge mouse movements. Neither are good for speedy menu item selection. Using (in essence) a 2 dimensional menu allows for larger, clearer fonts with less distance to travel to get to the entry you want. It also seems that people are somehow able to 'learn' the gestures to get to certain items quickly without even reading the menu's. It's like changing gear on a stick-shift car - you don't even have to think about the actual motion. "Right-Click then move up then right then up again" seems easier to get into "muscle memory" than "Right-Click, move down 1.3cm then move right then move down 2.6cm". I think the DISADVANTAGE of this scheme is that the beginner doesn't see a clearly presented *list* of options - this is perhaps a problem - but it could be a configuration option to select which style of popup menu you want - and in most packages that use these gesture menu's, there is also a standard menu containing all the options in the usual place at the top of the window. I saw a demo of one of these systems where a joystick was used to select the menu item - with the idea that you could mouse with one hand and pick menu's with joystick with the other. Dunno about that - I like my hotkeys. ---- Steve Baker (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail) L3Com/Link Simulation & Training (817)619-2466 (Fax) Work: sjbaker@xxxxxxxx http://www.link.com Home: sjbaker1@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.sjbaker.org
