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:
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—John Thorne, U.S. cookbook writer. Simple Cooking, “Rice and Peas: A Preface with Recipes,” Viking Penguin (1987)
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