From: Hopkins, Don [mailto:Hopkins, Don] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 1998 9:45 PM
To: 'Richard I. Anderson'
Cc: dhopkins@maxis.com
Subject: RE: BayCHI - Oct. 13

I'm sorry this took so long. We just made a milestone today, so I've
been up late working hard all week! The result of the milestone is a
nice stable game with many new features, that will be fun to
demonstrate at the talk!

Here is a title, an abstract, and a short bio. 

I've put together an outline for the talk, and the next step is
editing together the videos I want to show. I don't have the necessary
AV equipment but I will ask some friends if I can borrow theirs. I
will make a hi-8 tape with excerpts from a bunch of video tapes I've
taken.

I've ordered Brad Meyers' "All The Widgets" video (I lent out my copy)
that has a bunch of good pie menu demos I produced, that I'd like to
show at the talk. They should be shipping it to me soon. Would it be
possible for me to queue the tape and for an AV person to switch from
hi-8 to vhs live during the talk, or would it be better for me to copy
the parts I want onto one hi-8 tape?

All the Widgets starts out with the most amazing black and white film
of Doug Engelbart demonstrating his mouse and chord keyboard with NLS
in 1968, that I would love to show if there is time. Almost like the
introduction to the outer limits, it captures the fantastic wonder of
things we take for granted today. ("We control the horizontal. We
control the vertical. Do not attempt to adjust your computer.") I have
one of his old mice and a chord keyboard I could bring for show and
tell, which might be interesting!

    -Don


Title

Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus

Abstract

Pie menus are a naturally efficient user interface technique:
directional selection of pie slice shaped targets. The cursor starts
out in the center of the pie, so all targets are large, nearby, and in
different directions. Fitts' Law explains the advantages of pie menus,
relating fast selection speed and low error rate to large target size
and small distance. Pie menus are easy for novice users, who just
follow the directions, and efficient for experienced users, who can
quickly "mouse ahead" once they know the way.

The practical development and evolution of pie menus has been driven
not only by scientific theory and experiments, but also by practical
first hand experience using pie menus on a regular basis, and applying
them to real world products.

User interface design is not so much a process of raw artistic
creation, nor the legalistic application of interface guidelines and
theories, but more like the exploration and discovery of naturally
efficient ways of solving problems given particular sets of
constraints. The outcome is different every time because the
constraints always vary, but some of the underlying principles are
universal. Doug Engelbart believes very strongly that the human-tool
co-evolution should be based on rigorous exploratory use in a wide
variety of real-world applications.

Don Hopkins will discuss the design of various real- and
not-so-real-world applications he's developed with pie menus, from his
first X10 window manager 11 years ago, to his latest game at Maxis,
"The Sims".

Bio

Don Hopkins has been researching and programming alternative user
interfaces across various platforms in different tongues, including
Forth, PostScript, Lisp, and ScriptX, and lots of obscure special
purpose extension languages. His interests include cellular automata,
visual programming, user interfaces, games, networking, real time
graphics, toolkits and window managers, object oriented programming,
distributed objects and hypermedia, artificial intelligence, reading
and writing code, and applying the works of Philip K. Dick and
Stanislaw Lem to software design.

Don has worked as a migrant research programmer for the University of
Maryland Parallel Processing Lab, Heterogeneous Systems Lab, and Human
Computer Interaction Lab, as well as The Turing Institute, Carnegie
Mellon University, Kaleida Labs, and Interval Research Corporation.

He's also worked in the real world as a software developer,
programming am Open Look NeWS toolkit in PostScript for Sun
Microsystems, porting SimCity to Unix and adding multi-player
collaboration for DUX Software, developing a real time visual data
flow programming language for Levity and Interval, creating a visual
NeWS programming environment for HCIL and Grasshopper Group, and
hacking Gosling Emacs for UniPress Software. He's currently working at
Maxis on a family simulation game designed by Will Wright.