The floating menus / widgets have been an idea I have been thinking / working on for quite a while. My first experiments have been based on webviews, which unfortunately came with some disadvantages so I moved away from that approach again. Now since macOS 13 SwiftUI has become pretty powerful and I was able to implement the floating menus using that technology. I'm pretty happy with this now, so I'm releasing the fist alpha version to the public.
There are still many things missing, but now that I have a working base, it should be fast to iterate on this.
Things I'm still working on:
Various Widgets (e.g Weather, Dock, Clipboard)
Keyboard navigation
Sub menus (currently basic support for 1 level of sub menus is there, but this will be improved)
Plugin system to allow arbitrary SwiftUI views to be added
Performance improvements
Long press and other click variations
Documentation
The floating menus will also be the base for the new BTT Remote for iOS. (So you can show them on your iPad/iPhone and control your Mac). In the future the existing Notch Bar and the Stream Deck implementation in BTT will also migrate to be specialized versions of Floating Menus.
Some examples:
1.) A floating menu that shows up when hovering the Notch of a current Macbook: NotchMenu.bttpreset (28.5 KB)
This looks really, really promising. Thank you very much!
A lot of options and settings... that's good! But it takes time to try everything.
Some things I probably do not understand yet. For example, this action should show/hide a menu by name with a shortcut? That does not work here. Otherwise everything works so far.
give the possibility of "different layers" for the same floating menu. As it is the case with the Notch Bar. Without modifiers I see one layer, with modifiers another. But I don't understand how this works right now.
With the Notch Bar, the visibility (with/without modifiers) can be set for each item. With the floating menus only for the whole menu. So, I can not have a menu open, press and hold cmd so that I can see other buttons?
Mm, I'm sure it's me, but unfortunately I don't understand how. Also in v4.077 the "modifier thing" applies to the whole menu, not to the individual buttons as is the case with the Notch Bar.
Is there a possibility to keep a hovered window open and close it only upon a specific command? The use case is that I would like to execute multiple buttons consecutively in a hovered window without closing it being closed and then minimize it afterwards.
What's cool ... BTT hyperkey can trigger a named trigger when the key is released.
So if you use hyperkey, you can make a floating menu appear by pressing and holding caps lock ... then click something or a lot ... as soon as caps lock is released again the menu closes.
Somehow it's not working, or I expressed myself wrongly. The concept is to dock a hovering window as a drawer. When the mouse hovers over it, it should remain open until a command arrives to close it. All button actions should not trigger the window's closure. I have disabled the feature as shown in your screenshot, but as soon as I move the mouse away from the hovering window, it closes again.
Ah, I see. That's not yet possible. You can adjust the time until the menu minimizes again, but you can not prevent it completely. I'll add an option for this.
applies to the whole menu, not to the individual buttons as is the case with the Notch Bar.
