'Pieoneer' Changed the Way I Interact With Apps on My Mac

There are many easy ways to launch apps on your Mac. You can click an icon in the Dock, use Spotlight Search (or better alternatives), or visit the Applications folder and fire up your favorite apps. None of these methods are as fast and as fun as launching apps with Pieoneer, a launcher that lets you add your favorite apps to a radial menu. It also has two other useful features—a built-in app switcher and an easy way to surface hidden features of your favorite apps.

Using Pieoneer as an app launcher

This is the simplest part of using Pieoneer. Once you've installed the app, you can click its menu bar icon and go to Settings > Launcher. Here, you can record a keyboard shortcut to activate the Pieoneer, and you can add, reorder, and remove apps from the launcher. Pieoneer doesn't appear to limit how many apps you can add to the radial launcher, but maybe it should. It looks great for up to 10 apps, but starts to look cramped after that. As an experiment, I added every app that I launch regularly. With 21 apps in the launcher, Pieoneer started to look like a pizza with way too many toppings.

Thankfully, sanity prevailed, and I removed apps that I don't need to launch all the time. Once setup is complete, Pieoneer will do its job quickly and reliably. Press the keyboard shortcut to see the radial menu and use your mouse cursor to click the app you want to launch. I found myself wishing for a way to use Pieoneer without the mouse, but at the moment that isn't possible. It'd be quite janky to try to use arrow keys to navigate the radial menu anyway, so I agree with the developer's design decision here.

Setting up the app switcher

You can also use Pieoneer as a faster way to switch between running apps. To try it, find the Switcher tab in the settings menu, then set a keyboard shortcut for this action. Once you do that, you can fire it up to see all your open apps in the same radial menu. Use the mouse cursor to quickly select an app and it'll immediately come to the foreground. I find this faster than using Command-Tab to switch between running apps on my MacBook.

The hidden gem: Controller

I think the best feature in Pieoneer is Controller, which makes it easier to access features buried under layers of menus in various apps. To use this, you'll have to give this app Accessibility permissions on your Mac. Pieoneer is on the Mac App Store, which means it's under additional scrutiny from Apple, so you shouldn't worry about granting these permissions. Go to the app's settings, select the Controller tab, and click the button to grant Accessibility permissions, which will open System Settings. Once you've approved the app there, restart Pieoneer to use this feature.

You should set up a keyboard shortcut for the Controller first, then start adding apps that you want to use it with. Once you've added some apps, you need to manually add shortcuts to each app. I used the opportunity to add my favorite shortcuts in Ulysses, my default writing app. From that moment, I've been using the Controller to quickly run these shortcuts to view the word count, export text, check the outline, etc. It's a bit tedious to manually set this up for each app, but it's a one-time hassle, after which Pieoneer makes things a lot easier.

A better overall experience

Pieoneer has improved my experience of launching and switching between apps, and its Controller feature is the icing on the cake. The best part is the app's UI. I love the attention to detail, too. Each animation looks fluid, the switches in settings can be clicked or dragged, and the app lets you enable sounds too. When you scroll through the radial menu, each item selection plays a nice sound and you can switch it to a more playful variation that sounds like do-re-mi-fa-so. 

My only complaint with this app is that it sometimes automatically opened the settings window on my Mac. Other than this minor bug, Pieoneer has done everything it promised, and done it quite well. While I was able to buy the app for $5, the price seems to have jumped to $10 since I started using it. However, the app is still a good value if you like the idea of using radial menus for launching or switching between apps.