http://www.osnews.com/story/19223/Kommando_a_Floating_Panel_for_KDE Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:26:04 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?298031 http://osnews.com/thread?298031 This is pretty and nice for showing off. Realistically, you will have at least 10 items in the circle (I will have around 200). And many of those 10 items will have submenus. Some of those will have sub-sub menus. Finding the right thing in a circle of 10 unlabeled items quickly will be a pain in the a**. Finding the right thing in swarms of tens of items wil be... I'd rather not say.

Maybe It'll suit you better but not me. But this might be useful for storing maybe 5 very frequently used actions and using another panel as the main one.Edited 2008-01-28 00:17 UTC Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sultanqasim) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?298032 http://osnews.com/thread?298032 I've been dying for something like this. I love the Neverwinter Nights pie style menu. Unfortunately as you said, it really is only feasible for something like a favorites menu. Once you go past your favored 20 applications or so, it becomes a bit unusable.

But then if it went with just a standard install of having only one web browser, email, photo viewer, etc. It'd work quite well. Even with your typical Gnome environment that has only Internet -> Web Browser or Internet -> Email, etc. But once you open something like the Games menu, you'd have to split it (like you can set up in Debian) as Arcade, Strategy, Board Games, etc.

I love the usability of the pie menu. But don't like the limitation of the amount of items you can have in it before it becomes unmanageable. I actually hated Neverwinter Nights 2, simply because they did away with the pie menu, which I thought worked beautifully for that game. Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (leech) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?298043 http://osnews.com/thread?298043 The old UWM/UDE window-manager/desktop had a similar feature, but each item was enclosed in an octagon tile, and the tiles were arranged in octagonal "wheel": http://udeproject.sourceforge.net/images/screenshots/ude029.1.jpg

It looks like extra tiles/items were possible outside of the octagonal wheel: http://udeproject.sourceforge.net/images/screenshots/ude022.jpg Mon, 28 Jan 2008 04:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tupp) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?298050 http://osnews.com/thread?298050 Sorry. I meant to say "hexagon" and "hexagonal" instead of "octagon" and "octagonal." Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tupp) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?298099 http://osnews.com/thread?298099 Yet another pie menu written.

Where's the mention of why I should care about this one? Pie menus are nice and all, but KDE has a million launcher apps and this one is just another one--and from the looks of it, not an especially complete one.

Why does this matter? Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sorpigal) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?298113 http://osnews.com/thread?298113 there was an excellent app called pop-mouse from a company called POINTIX (extinct now) in windows world.

you can shake your mouse and make circular movements and a vast kind of floating menus appears, it was extremely customizable; i'm still using it in windows,
it has 11 years old (i think).

i tried WINE on it and it worked limited.

there is something similar for linux out there?

sorry my english. Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (enzobelmont) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?298179 http://osnews.com/thread?298179 The idea of this menu style is called pie-menu and (like most good and not-so good dieas) is already quiet old... You can find a bit more info on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (MatzeB) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?298225 http://osnews.com/thread?298225 Yeah, that is what I said in my post. The idea is rather old, and there is already one that you can install under Debian, but it is really basic (no icons, text only) and if I recall only works with twm.

I really like the concept though, it just hasn't had a good implementation, though I think Neverwinter Nights did it wonderfully.

I'll have to give UDE a shot though, I just like trying new things (even if they're old.) Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (leech) Comments