It's impossible to fully convey an interactive experience like pie menus in words and static pictures on web pages, or even quicktime movies small enough to distribute on the web. The best thing is to download the software and try it yourself, but many interesting pie menus only run on obsolete or discontinued window systems and operating systems, or require outrageously expensive software and hardware to run. Fortunately, all kinds of interesting pie menus have been captured and preserved on video tape!
Don Hopkins has produced a video tape of pie menus, iincluding the best cuts of video tapes from 12 years of pie menu research and development, and an instructional demonstration of ActiveX pie menus. If you're planning on using ActiveX pie menus in your own application, or developing your own pie menus, this video will give you lots of ideas that you're free to use yourself and improve upon.
For a partial transcript and screen snapshots from the tape, you can see Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus, a web page about a talk given by Don Hopkins to BayCHI, October 13 1998, at the Xerox PARC auditorium.
I'm selling this tape to recoup the cost of editing it together from many video tapes I've taken over the years, and producing an up to date tutorial about ActiveX Pie Menus, software that I'm distributing for free (including source code). I'm asking $40 a copy, and offering an educational or programmers discount of $25, but charging an additional $250 handling fee for patent lawyers and their ilk. If you can afford more, I'd be glad to throw in lots of printed documentation and papers -- just tell me what you're interested in!
To order a copy, please contact Don Hopkins by email at don@toad.com, or by phone at (510) 547-3006.
