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Lessons Learned Building a Radial Menu App for macOS (19 Min Read)
- hauken 1y agoI’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.
- AStonesThrow 1y agoOh man, I was so fascinated and enthralled by the mere concept of radial menus, back in the 90s when I was using twm (and its cousins) on Sun workstations. 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°.
- hauken 1y agoTotally 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.