Pie Menus for Gtk+ 1.2.x
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
All we are saying - is give pie a chance.
Why Pie Menus?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
You may ask whether there is any reason for those strangely shaped
menus with exotic control. Are pie menus yet another step in direction
of unstandardised applications with behaviour no one knows how to use?
In my point of view, pie menu is alternative to usual layout of
menus, alternative which should be standardised in near future. Why? -
because they are faster, faster in everyday work with your mouse.
When you pop up old-style menu, you have _always_ to synchronise your
eyes with mouse pointer and menu items and this cost time and your
attention.
But when you know your way through pie menu everything is a little
bit simpler - just few quick mouse motions - (for example "left", "up")
and since direction (not position) of these motions is important you
do not lose you time while trying to put your mouse pointer over right
menu item.
Using GtkPieMenu menu in Gtk+ applications
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
GtkPieMenu is offspring of GtkMenu in Gtk+ widget class hierarchy.
Thus you use similar functions while working with GtkPieMenu.
Essential functions:
GtkWidget* gtk_pie_menu_new (void);
Creates new pie menu.
In fact you can use gtk_menu_append to append usual menu item to pie
menu. But usually you want to specify position of menu item in pie
menu (its direction)
void gtk_pie_menu_put_with_compass (GtkPieMenu *menu,
GtkWidget *child,
GtkPieCompass compass);
gtk_pie_menu_put_with_compass put menu item in desired direction -
see gtkpiemenu.h for predefined constants (GTK_PIE_N for north etc).
And finally there are two functions for displaying pie menu (I
suppose that you want to get something displayed):
void gtk_menu_popup (GtkMenu *menu,......)
void gtk_pie_menu_popup (GtkPieMenu *menu,
guint button,
guint32 activate_time);
gtk_menu_popup is well known function which pops up GtkPieMenu in
old (and boring) layout. Using gtk_pie_menu_popup you pop up menu as a
real pie menu. In your application you can take an advantage of these
two functions and let user chose prefered menu style (I bet that he
choose nifty GtkPieMenus :)
[recommendation]: For pie menu beginners it is easy to confuse directions -
because their hand is not yet trained for pie menus. It is easy to distinguish
between eight directions (N, NE, E,...) but you have to be (Old) Surehand to
always direct your hand in right direction when there are sixteen menu items
per pie menu. Also IMHO it is not always wise to use pie menu to control
actions which can not be easily reverted. Even though I like pie menus I think
that it is not best idea to control nuclear power station with pie menus.
Pie Menu Links
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Pie Window Manager
http://www.crynwr.com/piewm/
Dob Hopkin's page about pie menus
http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/index.html
Thanks to:
-=-=-=-=-=-=
Richard Stallman & The Free Software Foundation
for GNU, GPL, FSF, Emacs, gcc, gdb, etags ....
Peter Mattis, The GTK Team and Gimp people
for GTK and Gimp.
Linus Torvalds
for (what a surprise) Linux kernel.
XFree86 Team
for XFree86.
... and finally to my grand mamma for great pies, cakes,... :)
------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Skarda <0rfelyus@ucw.cz>
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~0rfelyus/
ftp://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/pub/local/0rfelyus/
