I’m a designer who built a radial menu app (Pie Menu) for macOS as a side project.
This is the story of what went right, what went wrong, and what I learned turning an idea into a shipped product.
Readit Newshauken commented on Lessons Learned Building a Radial Menu App for macOS (19 Min Read) hauken.no/pie-menu/... · Posted by u/hauken
hauken commented on Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS pie-menu.com/... · Posted by u/hauken
So for Adobe apps, for which this would be very useful, they install by default as Adobe <appname> <year>, i.e. "Adobe Photoshop 2023". I have several revisions installed for most of them for various reasons. When I attempt to add a shortcut from pie-menu.com, it tells me "Application adobe photoshop is not installed on your computer" :(
Yes. We’re having some issues with Adobe apps on some Macs. We hope to have a fix out for that soon!
hauken commented on Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS pie-menu.com/... · Posted by u/hauken
Similar to https://charmstone.app/ but I really enjoy your "contextual" config. I wish it was dynamic somehow, though..
Could you elaborate what you mean by dynamic?
hauken commented on Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS pie-menu.com/... · Posted by u/hauken
Are there plans to make Pie Menu available on Homebrew? I don't install anything from the App Store on mac.
No. Not at the moment. We're currently only available in the App Store or in Setapp.
Though you could install it via:
$ brew install mas
$ mas install 1631568126
hauken commented on Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS pie-menu.com/... · Posted by u/hauken
hauken commented on Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS pie-menu.com/... · Posted by u/hauken
I've made one these for the web a few years ago
https://github.com/victorqribeiro/radialMenu
I was going to rewrite it using it SVG instead of canvas but never came around to it
Nice!
That would have probably saved me a lot of time when implementing on the website instead of trial and error. Current version on the website is however only done with CSS (and React).
hauken commented on Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS pie-menu.com/... · Posted by u/hauken
Have you considered displaying the text representation of the currently-hovered menu item inside the center of the circle? Or if the text wouldn't fit, then above/below the circle?
It already shows the text of the currently-hovered menu item inside the center of the circle. See examples here: https://www.pie-menu.com/help/show-options
hauken commented on Show HN: Pie Menu – a radial menu for macOS pie-menu.com/... · Posted by u/hauken
Nice work – radial menus are so underrated.
A feature request is to allow the menu to ride along the cursor trajectory, effectively evolving the menu into a gesture GUI. I made an attempt at an svg implementation eight years ago: https://rawgit.com/lgrkvst/d3-sunburst-menu/master/demo/d3-s...
Thanks!
That is a really fun interaction, and something I think I'll explore as we later on probably will work on submenus.
Just to imagine that whatever clod had invented the one-dimensional "context/dropdown" menus, had somehow won forever and always over the extremely logical choice of a radial, I just couldn't understand how.
The only explanation would have been that a radial menu is more difficult to typeset and render onscreen if you're rotating/sizing fonts and images around 360°.
That said, for dense context menus and dropdowns, I think linear lists are actually faster to scan.