Great ideas! The Method of Loci is a very powerful concept, that takes excellent advantage of how human memory works, and works nicely with zooming user interfaces, and is a great way to support user-defined editable pie menus that you can easily navigate with gestures.
I've experimented with combining the kinesthetic advantages of pie menus and gesture with the method of loci and zooming interfaces, including a desktop app called MediaGraph for arranging and navigating music, and an iPhone app called iLoci for arranging notes and links and interactive web based applets.
>MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus. A prototype developed for Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club.
>This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata.
It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.
>iPhone iLoci Memory Palace App, by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp.
A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam, on November 28, 2008.
DonHopkins 81 days ago | parent | favorite | on: Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes
>Great idea, I totally get it! Your graphics are beautiful, and the layering and gridding look helpful.
It reminds me of some experimental user interfaces with pie menus I designed for creating and editing memory palaces: "iLoci" on the iPhone for notes and pictures and links and web browser integration in 2008, and "MediaGraph" on Unity3D for organizing and playing music in 2012, both of which I hope will inspire you for ideas to implement (like pie menus, and kissing!) or ways to explain what you've already created.
>A memory map editor can not only benefit from pie menus for editing and changing properties (like simultaneously picking a font with direction, and pulling out the font size with distance, for example), but it's also a great way for users to create their own custom bi-directionally gesture navigable pie menus by dragging and dropping and "kissing" islands together against each other to create and break links (like bridges between islands). (See the gesture navigation example at the end of the MediaGraph demo, and imagine that on an iPad or phone!) [...]
>I like the idea of moving away from hierarchal menu navigation, towards spatial map navigation. It elegantly addresses the problem of personalized user created menus, by making linking and unlinking locations as easy as dragging and dropping objects around and bumping them together to connect and disconnect them. (Compare that to the complexity of a tree or outline editor, which doesn't make the directions explicit.) And it eliminates the need to a special command to move back up in the menu hierarchy, by guaranteeing that every navigation is obviously reversible by moving in the opposite direction. I believe maps are a lot more natural and easier for people to remember than hierarchies, and the interface naturally exploits "mouse ahead" (or "swipe ahead") and is obviously self revealing.
I've experimented with combining the kinesthetic advantages of pie menus and gesture with the method of loci and zooming interfaces, including a desktop app called MediaGraph for arranging and navigating music, and an iPhone app called iLoci for arranging notes and links and interactive web based applets.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mediagraph-demo-a7534add63e5
>MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus. A prototype developed for Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club.
>This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata. It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.
MediaGraph Demo Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopki...
>iPhone iLoci Memory Palace App, by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp. A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam, on November 28, 2008.
iLoci Demo Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98
Here's some more discussion about window managers, the Method of Loci, MediaGraph and iLoci, and pie menus:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22089694
DonHopkins 81 days ago | parent | favorite | on: Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes
>Great idea, I totally get it! Your graphics are beautiful, and the layering and gridding look helpful. It reminds me of some experimental user interfaces with pie menus I designed for creating and editing memory palaces: "iLoci" on the iPhone for notes and pictures and links and web browser integration in 2008, and "MediaGraph" on Unity3D for organizing and playing music in 2012, both of which I hope will inspire you for ideas to implement (like pie menus, and kissing!) or ways to explain what you've already created.
>A memory map editor can not only benefit from pie menus for editing and changing properties (like simultaneously picking a font with direction, and pulling out the font size with distance, for example), but it's also a great way for users to create their own custom bi-directionally gesture navigable pie menus by dragging and dropping and "kissing" islands together against each other to create and break links (like bridges between islands). (See the gesture navigation example at the end of the MediaGraph demo, and imagine that on an iPad or phone!) [...]
>I like the idea of moving away from hierarchal menu navigation, towards spatial map navigation. It elegantly addresses the problem of personalized user created menus, by making linking and unlinking locations as easy as dragging and dropping objects around and bumping them together to connect and disconnect them. (Compare that to the complexity of a tree or outline editor, which doesn't make the directions explicit.) And it eliminates the need to a special command to move back up in the menu hierarchy, by guaranteeing that every navigation is obviously reversible by moving in the opposite direction. I believe maps are a lot more natural and easier for people to remember than hierarchies, and the interface naturally exploits "mouse ahead" (or "swipe ahead") and is obviously self revealing.