Radial menus

(Not a short-term wish.) Radial menus may not be appropriate for all applications but it’d be interesting to have a try, if the facility could be made available. (Has anyone tried easyGestures with Firefox on Windows?)

Would it be best to work on a completely new gadget in ResEd or investigate building icons into the existing RISC OS linear menu format first? (I must confess to being a WIMP programming novice - but I don't think there's already a facility to include icons within menus.)

Edit: Could also be implemented without icons .

Context sensitive menus could even be differentiated by colour and/or background texture. Such menus would effectively limit the number of menu items to 8 – I don’t know what the Style Guide says on this (if anything), as I don’t have a copy.

That’s an interesting idea. For the record, RISC OS menus are actually fully-fledged windows containing icons – each line is a separate icon. They share the usual properties with icons – text, sprite, text+sprite, background colour, etc. So it might not be impossible to have a new window with a different layout that generated the same clicks as a conventional menu. Ideally you’d need to have a transparent background to windows so you can see underneath, but I suppose you might get away with a square non-transparent window.

Thanks for the menu window definition info. (Edit: I've now read the Notes within Wimp_CreateMenu.) I agree about the transparent bg… anything square-ish would look odd. I’ve recently been experimenting with AppBasic and ResEd, so may investigate your suggestions further at some point.

Perhaps Transparency should be implemented first, preferably compatible with that included in RO6

Perhaps Transparency should be implemented first,

Is this already covered within the conceptual ideas listed at the bottom of the Individual specifications ? As there’s no spare room within Window Flags what are the reserved bits in Extra Window Flags intended for? Also, is there anything within ScreenFX to base things on?

preferably compatible with that included in RO6

Does this mean BlendTable (Edit: and alpha channel manipulation )?

Just posting a cross reference to a mention of non-rectangular windows