Thread by @twolivesleft

Gonna post some of the details from the blog here because hacker news took me offline

Here's the two basic ways you interact. Tapping or dragging

You can move from a tap interaction to a drag interaction by swiping on the menu after its open, there's some hidden details here re. scrolling menus

Unlike popover controllers, the menus dismiss immediately on any interaction with the underlying views (scrolling the editor in this case). Makes them feel more lightweight

I got this idea from @procreate — they do the same thing with their custom popovers. You can start drawing on the canvas right after choosing a colour, no need to tap-to-dismiss the popover

I needed to support long menus (and small screens). It uses a scroll view when the content exceeds a max height

Then you can either tap-and-scroll through the menu, or use a single drag gesture and pull towards the edge to scroll to the item and select it

Then there are a bunch of details that come out of using these menus in a real app. In the next major Codea update we switch between real tab bars and compact menus as you resize

But the tab bars impact the readability of the menu at times

So we compute amount of area covered by the menu item over its underlying views, and decide whether to use a light or dark tint dynamically

(No, UIVibrancyEffect doesn't do this and results in less readable menus)

On displaying the shortcuts: doing it naively — just rendering text on the right side — leads to fairly uneven characters. macOS has a complex column-based shortcut key layout. I recreated this with a UIStackView here

The other neat thing is you can incorporate standard gesture-based shortcuts right in the menu. It'd be good to have these functions explicit in the Edit menu, too, but it's nice to have

Finally, you can also use the iOS drag-and-drop API to re-order menu items (where it makes sense). And even do tricky things like this

This clip shows exporting a Lua file out into the file system, then importing a plain text file right into your code as a tab