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I always thought that the "marking menu" style in Maya was always a neat implementation. Keeping the traditional context menu to not alienate regular users, but

by Bigpet 5y ago

I always thought that the "marking menu" style in Maya was always a neat implementation. Keeping the traditional context menu to not alienate regular users, but offering radial and gesture style navigation was really a great choice for its niche. A power-user software that makes heavy use of mouse manipulation is perfect for those kind of "enhancements" of traditional ui elements. The marking menu style made the learning was more pleasant than let's say the very keyboard shortcut heavy interface of Blender. But I feel like after struggling a while with the shortcuts, using Blender felt faster after the learning curve. So maybe there's some niche between expert systems and beginner friendly apps or in embedded devices where such "intermediate UI" solutions are better at home.

aasasd 5y ago
It seems this is the ‘marking menu’: https://lesterbanks.com/lxb_metal/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Creating-a-Hieght-Reference-Command-and-Marking-Menu-in-Maya.jpg https://lesterbanks.com/lxb_metal/wp-content/uploads/2014/02... But it looks pretty dubious from the perspective of Fitts' law. The items to the left and right are vaguely okay-ish: they're long in the direction of cursor movement, however you need to hit the narrow vertical profile while there's empty space above and below each item. The top and bottom items, though, are narrow in the direction of cursor movement while being far enough from the mouse that the movement will have some speed. It's the same problem as Windows' menus have, only closer to the mouse so not that pronounced. Meanwhile, in a classical radial menu, the items are closer to the cursor and they should have considerable depth in the dimension of cursor movement if they use icons of non-microscopic size.
- Bigpet 5y ago
  you don't actually need to hit the boxes, you just need to point into the direction. So, right click, drag, release. That's enough to trigger one of the options. Over- or undershooting are not an issue. You also don't need to wait for sub-menus to appear, so if you know there's a menu going north, south, north. Then you can just drag your mouse up, down, up in one motion and it will detect the direction changes.
  - aasasd 5y ago
    > you just need to point into the direction Ah, indeed that's better if I understand it right—depending on the actual target areas.

by Bigpet 5y ago

aasasd 5y ago

It seems this is the ‘marking menu’: https://lesterbanks.com/lxb_metal/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Creating-a-Hieght-Reference-Command-and-Marking-Menu-in-Maya.jpg https://lesterbanks.com/lxb_metal/wp-content/uploads/2014/02... But it looks pretty dubious from the perspective of Fitts' law. The items to the left and right are vaguely okay-ish: they're long in the direction of cursor movement, however you need to hit the narrow vertical profile while there's empty space above and below each item. The top and bottom items, though, are narrow in the direction of cursor movement while being far enough from the mouse that the movement will have some speed. It's the same problem as Windows' menus have, only closer to the mouse so not that pronounced. Meanwhile, in a classical radial menu, the items are closer to the cursor and they should have considerable depth in the dimension of cursor movement if they use icons of non-microscopic size.

Bigpet 5y ago
you don't actually need to hit the boxes, you just need to point into the direction. So, right click, drag, release. That's enough to trigger one of the options. Over- or undershooting are not an issue. You also don't need to wait for sub-menus to appear, so if you know there's a menu going north, south, north. Then you can just drag your mouse up, down, up in one motion and it will detect the direction changes.
- aasasd 5y ago
  > you just need to point into the direction Ah, indeed that's better if I understand it right—depending on the actual target areas.