Yes that's right! The pie menus in Blender are wonderful, as is the whole Blender app, ecosystem, and community.
Here's the paper we published in 1988 showing that pie menus were 15% faster and had significantly lower error rates than linear menus, which I 3/4 unsuccessfully tried to explain and demonstrate to Steve Jobs. (At least I got three "that sucks" to one "Wow, that’s neat" out of him. ;)
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus. Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, ACM SIGCHI '88:
It's near impossible to convince people like Steve Jobs and organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Open Software Foundation, and even less open-to-outside-ideas open source projects like GIMP, to adopt unconventional ideas like pie menus.
One of Blender's outstanding qualities is that they listen to their users and don't suffer from NIH syndrome, fortunately!
I got frustrated at trying to get pie menus into official corporate user interface toolkits, and took a job in the game industry at Maxis, where you're not only allowed but even required to roll your own user interface, and got them into SimCity and The Sims:
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:
Here's the paper we published in 1988 showing that pie menus were 15% faster and had significantly lower error rates than linear menus, which I 3/4 unsuccessfully tried to explain and demonstrate to Steve Jobs. (At least I got three "that sucks" to one "Wow, that’s neat" out of him. ;)
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus. Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, ACM SIGCHI '88:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures: An interview with visualization pioneer Ben Shneiderman:
https://medium.com/multiple-views-visualization-research-exp...
Here is a 30 year retrospective of pie menus that I wrote 7 years ago (the 37 year anniversary of the paper is coming up in a few days on May 15):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
Lots of demos of different kinds of pie menus here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0q...
It's near impossible to convince people like Steve Jobs and organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Open Software Foundation, and even less open-to-outside-ideas open source projects like GIMP, to adopt unconventional ideas like pie menus.
One of Blender's outstanding qualities is that they listen to their users and don't suffer from NIH syndrome, fortunately!
I got frustrated at trying to get pie menus into official corporate user interface toolkits, and took a job in the game industry at Maxis, where you're not only allowed but even required to roll your own user interface, and got them into SimCity and The Sims:
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27...
X11 SimCity Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA
Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE