Of course not all pie menu implementations support all the useful features, and some "ersatz pie menus" are really horrible because they are not designed to respect Fitts' Law, and only copy the surface features (like being round) without any of the essential properties or advanced features:

- popping up centered on the cursor, which starts out in the inactive center

- large pie slice shaped target regions extending to the screen edge, instead of only selecting items by clicking on their small labels

- delimiting item and submenu selection with mouse clicks, not distance of motion or pausing motion

- never introducing mandatory pauses and waits, or requiring you to always engage in a visual feedback loop, looking at the screen and moving the mouse and waiting until you see something before continuing (but that should always be possible if you don't mouse ahead)

- click-move-click as well as down-swipe-up gestures

- reliable, dependable mouse-ahead, even when the computer is lagging behind and freezing

- submenu navigation, back to parent menu, cancel all menus

- re-selection and browsing

- pop-up display pre-emption (don't pop up the menu window until the user stops moving the mouse, or releases the button to click up the menu even without pausing)

- real time live feedback hooks so the application can preview the effects of the direction/distance selection that you would get if you released the button

- live feedback before popping up the menu, so the popup menu doesn't overlap the thing you're editing with the menu

- live tooltip or overlay label and description feedback during gestures, and hiding or dimming labels on unselected items

- scrolling and paging -- see All the Pie Menus from Brad Myers ACM All The Widgets video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE

- proper screen edge handling and tracking, supporting mouse-ahead display pre-emption

- sound effects, voice, and haptic feedback

- keyboard and voice navigation (analog "voystick" vocal joystick formant/pitch tracking -- https://github.com/elisaoh/mypystick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXmccs4GIqI https://linguistics.washington.edu/research/projects-and-gra... )

- overflow linear target based items (to support greater than 8 items), laid out below like a drop-down menu, or in any other direction: up, left, right, diagonal, or custom layouts.

- instead of pies directly containing some number of items (which makes it hard to visualize the changing directions when adding and removing items), pies contain a fixed number of slices as independent containers of items, which define the directional layout before adding any items, and support empty slices (like a dummy no-op, to fill out a shameful 7 item menu to glorious 8), and slices with multiple items (with a linear layout showing all items in the slice, or a "pull-out" combobox showing one at a time as you move further out, like font size, etc)

- user defined and dynamically editable pie menus, submenus, items, and other user interface widgets, like the Blender pie menu editor does so well. Blender Add-on Review: Pie Menu Editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWwbBFQPrY

- arbitrary widgets and panels in menus, like Blender does so well. Fluent And Pie Menu Editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIa-Yu4Z35U

Usually people who design and implement "ersatz pie menus" make mistakes or omissions because they don't know better, don't have enough time or resources, haven't used pie menus themselves, or haven't studied Fitts' Law.

But unfortunately enough, there are actually people who purposefully implement crippled straw-man pie menus, even though they know better, just to acquire illegitimate software patents and spread FUD about pie menus.

Here is an example of a purposefully crippled design of pie menus that Gordon Kurtenbach implemented and published and claimed to be "typical", presumably in order to support false claims in an illegitimate patent on marking menus that he and Bill Buxton were granted, which has inhibited their adoption by making many companies and people afraid of using either marking menus or pie menus.

This video incorrectly labels them "Typical Radial Menus", but they are definitely not -- it's like they're designed to be as obnoxious and unusable as possible, aggressively triggering unsolicited submenus after you've only moved a small distance and before you've even clicked.

Demo of Marking Menus: A demonstration of the differences between marking menus, linear menus, and pie menus is shown. Shows the "marking" property of marking menus and the property of scale independence. By Gordon Kurtenbach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtH9GdFSQaw

I wrote this response to the video 10 years ago:

>Don Hopkins, 10 years ago:
These "typical pie menus" are not at all typical -- they're just "straw man pie menus". Typical pie menus (like the pie menus in The Sims) don't behave the way this straw man implementation demonstrates, and don't suffer from the disadvantages demonstrated here. Typical pie menus support "mouse ahead" gestures and scale independence, and it's disappointing that the authors of this video weren't aware of that, and attempt to define marking menus in terms of a straw man definition of pie menus.

Unfortunately in another 10 year old discussion I recently ran across about "Crowd funding project: Marking menus for Photoshop and other software," someone watched and cited that deceptive video, and was mistakenly convinced that "Pie menus are infinitely less powerful than Marking Menus, and absolutely not the same thing."

That's why I believe the whole point of that video with terribly designed fake "Typical Radial Menus" was to deceptively promote patented marking menus instead, and that all the FUD they spread has prevented companies like Adobe from using them in their products.

There is some difference, but it's not anything like that video misrepresents. The Wikipedia page on pie menus gets it right: "A marking menu is a variant of this technique that makes the menu less sensitive to variance in gesture size." And "a mouse click could be used to trigger an item or submenu". Nowhere does it mention triggering submenus without mouse clicks.

https://polycount.com/discussion/96932/crowd-funding-project...

Parroted FUD> Pie menus are infinitely less powerful than Marking Menus, and absolutely not the same thing. Where Marking Menus shine is in submenus, which I find to be cumbersome in regular pie menus (which is why my favourite implementations of pie menus eg. in Modo is without submenus).

I wrote a detailed reply to that parroted FUD, including copies the email between Gordon and I from December 1990, proving that I meticulously explained to Gordon how pie menus, submenus, mouse ahead, and tracking all worked together, more than a decade before he made that video, so he certainly did known better, and his video was purposefully deceptive, and his patent and FUD has held back progress and hurt users.

(You can see the comment and read my full reply and all the email from 1990 explaining pie menus to Gordon at the end of the link above.)