Getting Floating Menus to become visible faster

Floating Menus / Widgets
1

This is a very minor nitpick, so feel free to ignore my request. I created a Floating Menu that works great as a Launchpad replacement for me. Its visibility is toggled via a trackpad gesture, and it displays a 6-by-9 grid of menu items, each item displaying the icon (a 200x200 PNG file) and the name of an app.

The only issue is that there is a small but perceptible delay before the Floating Menu appears. To quantify this delay, I added an extra action (Send Keyboard Shortcut: ⌘N) before the Toggle Floating Menu Hidden/Shown action, duplicated the Floating Menu, removed all menu items from the duplicate, and made two screen recordings where I perform the trackpad gesture while a TextEdit window is active (which causes the ⌘N keyboard shortcut to create a new empty TextEdit tab before the Floating Menu is shown). The gesture is mapped to the empty Floating Menu in the first video, and to the original Floating Menu in the second video. The empty Floating Menu appears in the video three frames after the new TextEdit tab, which is an imperceptible difference to my eyes. The Floating Menu containing 54 menu items appears 12 frames after the new TextEdit tab, and I do notice this delay (or rather feel it) even during my normal use of the Floating Menu.

I wonder if it would be possible to add an option in the settings to use more RAM to reduce this delay to ~3 frames. By the way, I have enabled the Keep Menu in Cache option in the Floating Menu's Configuration > Advanced Menu Setup > Other (Z-Index / Title Bar Style).

The following screen recording uses the Floating Menu without menu items:

The following screen recording uses the Floating Menu with 54 menu items:

2

you can try this option in the "other" section, however I'm not sure whether it will apply correctly to your menu. Could you maybe share an export of your menu?

image
image2292×1680 396 KB

//edit: ah sorry just noticed you already have that enabled - in that case I'd probably need to add a full cache that keeps the whole menu basically active but in background

3

Based only on my perception, I don’t see any difference whether the Keep Menu in Cache option is enabled or not. I exported my Floating Menu as a bttpreset that seems to contain the icons also, and compressed it:

Floating Menu - Launchpad 1.bttpreset.zip (2.1 MB)

4

I'll check, I think I can add an option to fully cache everything. It shows up really fast on my machine though, but I think it can definitely be improved a bit more.

I'll look into it tomorrow.

5

With caching enabled your menu should now appear much faster in 5.683!

6

Yes, the Floating Menu feels instant on BTT 5.683. I made the same screen recording test I did before, and the Floating Menu becomes completely visible two frames after the TextEdit's new-tab-animation begins (and six frames before the new-tab-animation ends). Since the video has 60 fps, that's 2/60 = 0.0333 seconds. Great job!