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:
I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.
When I explained to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!"
But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? He just wasn't in the mood to be told that he could have a better user interface.
So I gave him one of the a "NeRD" buttons I'd made for NeWS NeRDs, which he appreciated.
Up to that time, NeXT was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!
Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!