In computer interface design, a pie menu (also known as a radial menu) is a circular context menu where selection depends on direction. A pie menu is made of several "pie slices" around an inactive center and works best with stylus input, and well with a mouse. Pie slices are drawn with a hole in the middle for an easy way to exit the menu.
Pie menus work well with keyboard acceleration, particularly four and eight item menus, on the cursor keys and the number pad. A goal of pie menus is to provide a smooth, reliable gestural style of interaction for novices and experts.
A slice can lead to another pie menu; selecting this may center the pointer in the new menu. A marking menu is a variant of the technique.
As a kind of context menu, pie menus are often context-sensitive, showing different options depending on what the pointer was pointing at when the menu was requested.
Read more about Pie Menu: History, Usage, Comparison With Other Interaction Techniques, Notable Implementations
Famous quotes containing the words pie and/or menu:
“I see the killer in him
and he turns on an oven,
an oven, an oven, an oven
and on a pie plate he sticks
in my Yellow Star....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“...what a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fete, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)