User Interfaces

[Tulan]

I've been developing the foundational code base for a web application for quite some time, a very solid piece of code. This last week I've moved onto higher-level interface and programming and have been experimenting/toying around with radial menus.

Site URL: http://24.234.73.31

This latest incarnation is a Javascript radial menu that uses the HTML5 canvas element (anyone without the latest version of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or Safari won't see this). The prototype took me a while to get down right. The upside to using Javascript + Canvas is graceful degradation; Flash offers some really nice eyecandy but doesn't degrade gracefully at all.

The site/application isn't anywhere near finished, but, this poll is to find out whether the radial menu is worth keeping/tweaking or not. In final form, it will probably look the same. It is essentially providing the user with five basic elements to navigate to, once there the system will provide more typical linear based navigational elements.

I posted this at 3 AM in the morning because I literally just got done with a 10 hour marathon of PHP5.2.10 + FreeBSD + Apache hacking (one of the modules broke the PHP binary and it took this long to whittle it down).

[LoneBear]

This latest incarnation is a Javascript radial menu that uses the HTML5 canvas element (anyone without the latest version of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or Safari won't see this). The prototype took me a while to get down right. The upside to using Javascript + Canvas is graceful degradation; Flash offers some really nice eyecandy but doesn't degrade gracefully at all.

Not sure I see the point to it; cute idea but if you use image maps, then you'd be compatible with the older browsers and get the same result, with the advantage of being a lot more colorful since you're dealing with images rather than plain text. Also seems to be rather space-consuming on the screen for a simple selection.

The site/application isn't anywhere near finished, but, this poll is to find out whether the radial menu is worth keeping/tweaking or not. In final form, it will probably look the same. It is essentially providing the user with five basic elements to navigate to, once there the system will provide more typical linear based navigational elements.

LOL... another site... sometimes I think you go through web sites like most people go through bags of potato chips (or Chili Fritos, as the case may be...)

If you're dealing with 5's, a pentagram might be symbolically a lot more eye-catching than a circle.