Lessons Learned Building a Radial Menu App for macOS (19 Min Read)

Oh 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°.

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.