by DonHopkins | 2025-06-27 11:57:45+00:00
A trip down memory lane to the Museum of Obsolete Technology (with video demos):

Here's how use XSLT to make Punkemon Pie Menus! [ WARNING: IE 5 required! ;) ]

The "htc" files are ActiveX components written in JScript, aka "Dynamic HTML (DHTML) behaviors":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Components

>HTML Components (HTCs) are a legacy technology used to implement components in script as Dynamic HTML (DHTML) "behaviors" in the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. Such files typically use an .htc extension and the "text/x-component" MIME type.

JavaScript Pie Menus, using Internet Explorer "HTC" components, xsl, and xml:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5k4gJK-aWw

>Pie menus for JavaScript on Internet Explorer version 5, configured in XML, rendered with dynamic HTML, by Don Hopkins.

punkemonpiemenus.html: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

punkemon.xsl: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

punkemon.xml: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

punkemonpiemenus.xml: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenu.htc: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

Also an XML Schema driven pie menu editor:

piemenuschemaeditor.html: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenuschemaeditor.xsl: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenuschema.xml: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenuschemaeditor.htc: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenuxmlschema-1.0.xsd: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

Here's an earlier version that uses ActiveX OLE Control pie menus, xsl, and xml, not as fancy or schema driven:

ActiveX Pie Menus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag

>Demo of the free ActiveX Pie Menu Control, developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

ActiveXPieMenuEditor.html: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenueditor.xsl: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenueditor.html: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenueditor.htc: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

piemenumetadata.xml: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

Fasteroids (Asteroids comparing Pie Menus -vs- Linear Menus):

fasteroids.html: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

fasteroids.htc: https://github.com/SimHacker/IE-JScript-HTC-PieMenus/blob/ma...

If that wasn't obsolete enough, here is the "ConnectedTV Skin Editor". It was a set of HTC components, XML, and XML Schemas, and a schema driven wysiwyg skin editor for ConnectedTV: a Palm Pilot app that turned your Palm into a personalized TV guide + smart remote.

Full fresh lineup of national and local broadcast + TiVo + Dish TV guides with customized channel groups, channel and show filtering and favorites, hot sync your custom tv guide with just the shows you watch, weeks worth of schedules you could download and hot sync nightly with the latest guide updates.

Integrated with trainable consumer IR remote controller with custom touch screen user interfaces (with 5-function "finger pie menus" that let you easily tap or stroke up/down/left/right to stack up multiple gesture controls on each button (conveniently opposite and orthogonal for volume up/down, channel next/previous, page next/previous, time forward/back, show next/previous, mute/unmute, favorite/ignore, etc -- finger pies are perfect for the kind of opposite and directionally oriented commands on remote controls, and you need a lot fewer 5-way buttons than single purpose physical buttons on normal remotes, so you could pack a huge amount of functionality into one screen, or have any number of less dense screens, customized for just the devices you have and features you use. Goodbye TiVo Monolith Monster remote controls, since only a few of the buttons were actually useful, and ConnectedTV could put 5x the number of functions per gesture activated finger pie menu button.

The skin editor let you make custom user interfaces by wysiwyg laying out and editing out any number of buttons however you liked and bind tap/left/right/up/down page navigation, tv guide time and channel and category navigation, sending ir commands to change the channel (sends multi digits per tap on station or show so you can forget the numbers), volume, mute, rewind/skip tivo, etc.

Also you could use finger pies easily and reliably on the couch in a dark room with your finger instead of the stylus. Users tended to lose their Palm stylus in the couch cushions (which you sure don't wanna go fishing around for if JD Vance has been visiting) while eating popcorn and doing bong hits and watching tv and patting the dog and listening to music and playing video games in their media cave, so non-stylus finger gesture control was crucial.

Finger pies were was like iPhone swipe gestures, but years earlier, much cheaper (you could get a cheap low end Palm for dirt cheap and dedicate it to the tv). And self revealing (prompt with labels and give feedback (with nice clicky sounds) and train you to use the gestures efficiently) instead of invisible mysterious iPhone gestures you have to discover and figure out without visual affordances. After filtering out all the stuff you never watch and favoriting the ones you do, it was much easier to find just the shows you like and what was on right now.

More on the origin of the term "Finger Pie" for Beatles fans (but I digress ;) :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615023

https://donhopkins.medium.com/gesture-space-842e3cdc7102

It was really nice to have the TV guide NOT on the TV screen taking you away from watching the current show, and NOT to have to wait 10 minutes while it slowly scrolled the two visible rows to through 247 channels to finally see the channel you wanted to watch (by that time you'll miss a lot of the show, but be offered lots of useless shit and psychic advice to purchase from an 800 number with your credit card!).

Kids these days don't remember how horrible and annoying those slow scrolling TV guides with ads for tele-psychics and sham wows and exercise machines used to be.

I can objectively say that it was much better than the infamous ad laden TV Guide Scroll:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkGR29TSueM

Using those slow scrolling non-interactive TV guides with obnoxious ads was so painful that you needed to apply HEAD ON directly to the forehead again and again and again to ease the pain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is3icfcbmbs

You could use the skin editor to create your own control panels and buttons for whatever TV, TiVO, DVR, HiFi, Amplifier, CD, DVD, etc players you wanted to use together. And we had some nice color hires skins for the beautiful silver folding Sony Clie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_CLI%C3%89_PEG-TG50

It was also nice to be able to curate and capture just the buttons you wanted for the devices that you actually use together, and put them all onto one page, or factor them out into different pages per device. You could ignore the 3 digit channel number and never peck numbers again, just stroke up on your favorite shows to switch the channel automatically.

We ran out of money because it was so expensive to license the nightly feed of TV guide (downloading a huge sql dump every night of the latest schedules as they got updated), and because all of our competitors were just stealing their data by scraping it from TV guide web sites instead of licensing it legally. (We didn't have Uber or OpenAI to look up to for edgy legal business practice inspiration.)

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, during the days that everybody was carrying a Palm Pilot around beaming their contacts back and forth with IR. What a time that was, right before and after 9/11 2001. I remember somebody pointedly commented that building a Palm app at that time in history was kind of like opening a flower shop at the base of the World Trade Center. ;(

https://github.com/SimHacker/ConnectedTVSkinEditor

https://www.pencomputing.com/palm/Pen44/connectedTV.html

https://uk.pcmag.com/first-looks/29965/turn-your-palm-into-a...

Connected TV User Guide:

Overview: https://donhopkins.com/home/ConnectedTVUserGuide/Guide1-Over...

Setting Up: https://donhopkins.com/home/ConnectedTVUserGuide/Guide2-Sett...

Using: https://donhopkins.com/home/ConnectedTVUserGuide/Guide3-Usin...

Memory: https://donhopkins.com/home/ConnectedTVUserGuide/Guide4-Memo...

Sony: https://donhopkins.com/home/ConnectedTVUserGuide/Guide5-Sony...