hauken

Totally agree that radial menus feel so natural for quick tool switching and expert workflows — that’s what inspired Pie Menu.

That said, for dense context menus and dropdowns, I think linear lists are actually faster to scan.

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.

Yes. We’re having some issues with Adobe apps on some Macs. We hope to have a fix out for that soon!

Could you elaborate what you mean by dynamic?

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

In the onboarding you can set your own preferred keyboard shortcut.

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).

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

Thanks! That is a really fun interaction, and something I think I'll explore as we later on probably will work on submenus.

Thanks. Didn't think of that. Do you have a suggestion of what character I could use for Cyrillic keyboard layout or others?

My intention is lifetime without air quotes

The things you learn! Good idea: easy fix to allow both on the website.

Thanks! I should test it more thoroughly. Wrapping a couple of the blurs and masks in @supports will probably quickly fix a couple of the issues.

Nice! I’ve noticed that I tend to use Pie Menu myself on apps where I frequently switch tools. Like Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator etc. Or for apps that have different modes: like Calendar (today, week, month), Things (today, inbox++), Obsidian (daily note, graph view, backlinks).

For other apps where the keyboard shortcuts acts more as other shortcuts I don’t use it as much.

Yes, as long as you can trigger a keyboard shortcut from the middle mouse click.

With help of better touch tool or others you can also trigger it with three finger tap on your trackpad: https://www.pie-menu.com/help/show-options

Thanks! I haven’t noticed that problem! Will try it out!

Free tier is 10 shortcut invocations a day before it resets next day.

You could also try a 7 day free trial if you pick the yearly subscription (you can then directly cancel in App store and not pay)

Here is more on the pricing: https://www.pie-menu.com/help/pricing

But as you say I haven’t written about the free tier there.

Didn’t know! I’ve just thought that this was a common pattern along with tab bars and other menu items.

Thanks! I’ve had a lot of doubts with the preview feature. Browsers won’t let you reliably use cmd/option for the same effect to preview it, so landed on shift + z. But in the app you can’t use that shortcut because it would trigger every time you write something with capital Z.

You set up the frequent shortcuts you want for each app: This way you can quickly switch between different modes or tools in your different apps by only remembering one shortcut.

Thanks for sharing! The ideas are still relevant today! In fact the first documented radial menu is attributed to a system called PIXIE in 1969 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu

Yes, it does a very superficial job. But to check for third-party cookies and if they are being set without consent is very difficult to normalize and check for.

For now, this is just a simple tool to check where a website fetches its information. However, it takes a shortcut by only traversing the DOM. It would be more precise if it checked all network activity from a site, but then it would have to fire up a browser for every search, and the loading times would be much, much longer (yes, I tried).

But if people find this helpful, I could work more on it to add more features as you suggest.

I have added links to the news about the decisions, but I see that the CSS styling made them similar to the rest of the text. I have fixed that now!

Yes. It doesn’t pick up everything. I’m just parsing the dom and checking for apparent things like script tags etc. I could have used puppeteer or similar to check all requests made, but the user experience became very slow, so I skipped that.

Yes! I thought about that but had a few issues with storing URLs in the sharable URL and don’t want to store any information to create an unique id for every url.

The irony. ;)

But the way the courts interpret GDPR essential parts of the internet are technically illegal if you are based in Europe.

The solution doesn’t differentiate between first-party or third-party servers. As long as any servers are outside Europe, it marks the site as in violation.

Thanks! Haven’t caught that one before.

The map state also persist from second search on, but I soon have a fix on that.

Yes. I had to switch the serverless function that checks location to a server in Sweden, or else almost every site was in violation.

After reading that German court has ruled that embedding Google Fonts violates GDPR because IP addresses are sent to the US, I made a webtool to check which servers websites requests.