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Link to article? How does one find this nifty looking radial menu?

Justin—go here: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

Open up the QuickSilver Prefs, go to Plug-Ins, then “All Plugins” in the side-menu. You should see a plugin marked “Constellation Menu” with a beta symbol next to it. Click the checkbox to install.

To use you just start using Quicksilver like you normally would, bring up an object, tab, then start typing “Radial”. Hit enter on “Show Radial Action Menu” and you are good to go.

Quicksilver is an amazing app. I’ve had it on my home and work Macs for over two years now, and couldn’t live without it. Once you try it, you will never want to dig through folders to launch a document or application again.

I tried out the radial menus, intrigued with the idea. The basic concept is that it’s an equally short reach to get to every option on the wheel, as opposed to a standard dropdown where you have to reach further for each subsequent item in the menu.

But I uninstalled the extension shortly thereafter. The radial menus are not keyboard-accessible as is the rest of Quicksilver; thats’ the big advantage for me. The less time you spend switching between the mouse and keyboard the better.

This is cool stuff. There are lots of other implementations running around – check out the Wikipedia article on “Pie Menus”, which is the generic term Don Hopkins coined for this kind of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu

Ross

You might want to change that link to quicksilver.blacktree.com. Quicksilver.com has nothing to do with it.

Pretty cool. Anyone else remember the radial menus from the Super NES game Secret of Mana? I like the layering in that Quicksilver interface, so you can keep your context/ location in the pies a bit more easily. Too bad it’s not keyboard friendly.

Wrong URL for Quicksilver.

http://www.blacktree.com/quicksilver

Greg is cool.

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro (used to be Alias Sketchbook) has a very similar interface. It’s very natural, almost like an artists pallete, especially when using a Wacom tablet.

I’m with MH. The best feature of QS for me is not having to move my hands from the keyboard. Looks cool, though.

Well, I know what the keyboard pundits are on about. But anything that innovative is worth a try. Reading Designing Interactions recently made me realize that the interfaces like the desktop, windows, and pulldowns – while they have been tried and true, it’s also possible that fairly arbitrary choices were made. What if this radial menu had been in the original mac os?

But I uninstalled the extension shortly thereafter. The radial menus are not keyboard-accessible as is the rest of Quicksilver; thats’ the big advantage for me. The less time you spend switching between the mouse and keyboard the better.

The reach to each item would be the same, but the reach to the mouse through meatspace would eat up any advantages that you’d find.

If you’re on you mouse a lot, I can see how it would speed things up. I’ve been considering a Dock hack that would put it in the bottom corner of the screen and display it radially, probably with magnification. That would improve the interface because you’ve got to mouse the dock anyways.

I think I first saw this kind of thing in DENIM

Radial menus make sense if the user can learn them by heart.

Alias Sketchbook is a good example of how to do them right: The user learns that the gesture “up” on top of a certain button always selects the same function. So when selecting it the user doesn’t even need to wait for the menu to open and to select the correct function. (It kind of goes past Fitts’ law in this sense.)

Then again, if there are that many commands, or if those are context-sensitive, it doesn’t really make so much sense.

Looks cool, and the interface idea is definitely cool, but I have one not-so-small problem with it. The revolution in Quicksilver is, for me, that I can get anywhere and do almost anything on my machine with a few keystrokes. One hand on the keyboard + muscle memory = I’m there in, at most, 2 seconds. If I have to make the switch from muscle memory to searching around a circle, then aiming and clicking with the mouse, no matter how cool it looks it’s just slowing me down, i.e. removing the one huge advantage Quicksilver has over all other sorts of launchers out there.

Of course I haven’t tried it out yet – maybe it works just as well with keystrokes. But then it’s just pretty but completely unnecessary window-dressing, isn’t it?

I’ve tried this kind of stuff with the Pie menu add-on in Firefox some times ago.

The problem is the number of options. Too much options, usability decreases.

Constantly changing, context-aware menus are double-edged swords.

Reminds me slightly of EasyGestures, the Firefox extension which provides mouse gestures for navigation and other things.

Twilight Macintosh anyone?