What I mean is that "Flicks" are essentially the same as pie menus, just another name for a particular implementation of pie menus, with its own set of features, limitations, visual feedback, design decisions and trade-offs (like limiting the number of items to 8, which is a sound idea).

So I would argue that Windows has at least two different types of pie menus, including Flicks. (Does IE still support that weird mouse-wheel-press up/down scrolling cookie? There's another!)

Much like many web sites have at least two kinds of linear menus: the stylish HTML popup menus that drop down when you mouse over the header titles, and the native platform dropdown menus that pop up when you mouse down in a select input. [5]

Pie menus can and should support "mouse (or pen, finger, whatever) ahead" and "display pre-emption" so you can operate them with quick flicks, without unnecessary feedback. But they can also optionally provide different kinds of visual feedback including traditional pop-up menu windows [1 @ 4:30], cursor icons [2 @ 4:40], drawing strokes and animated overlays (i.e. pac-man [1 @ 8:35], precision [1 @ 13:12], window management [3 @ 2:08]), and "direct manipulation" real-time in-world continuous feedback (i.e. object rotation tool [2 @ 4:40], font style selection [4 @ 1:55]).

[1] http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/video/1991/1991_piemenus.mpg

[2] http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TheSimsPieMenus.mov

[3] http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov

[4] http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/JavaScriptPieMenus.mov

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1cu_1vTNPw

The Sims supports two different kinds of pie menus:

1) The round pop-up menu windows that you get when you right click on an object to select an available action [2 @ 2:12], with a head in the middle, surrounded by text item labels.

2) Also the direct manipulation "object rotation tool" that lets you turn an object around to face four different directions [2 @ 4:40], which uses audio and cursor feedback plus in-world "direct manipulation" feedback by rotating the object itself in real time.

Operationally, the object rotation tool tracks exactly like a four-item pie menu sliced vertically and horizontally, with a small inactive region in the center. But visually it's so obvious what it does that there's no need to pop up a window with labels.

Real time visual feedback previewing the effect of the gesture in the world is the ideal direct visual representation, so if there's a good way to obviously and unambiguously represent the menu actions directly, like applying attribute changes to text [4 @ 1:55], it renders distracting pop-up windows unnecessary (or optional and useful for training).

In 1988, the HyperTIES hypermedia browser [6] supported pie menus with directional flicking gestures and mouse-ahead display pre-emption for paging forward and back (left and right), navigating the history, selecting which window to open a link in, and user defined menus with feedback based on continuous direction and distance (color hue/saturation/brightness [1 @ 10:42], font family/style/size [1 @ 12:14], etc).

[6] http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/LookBackAtHyperTIES.html

>Designing to facilitate browsing: A look back at the Hyperties workstation browser. Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland.

>Pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions:

>To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu items at the top or bottom of the screen.

>3. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION

>The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking. Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection, but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the control of the selection is.

>The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window, they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.