Thank you! When I made the project public, I posted it here with Show HN tag, and it went pretty well, with many encouraging comments. I especially liked your point about not worrying about things you can't control. But something is difficult to know what you can control and what you can't.
Thank you to detect these typos!! If you want to collaborate please click on Edit page link located at bottom of each page and create a PR. I'll merge ASAP.
I had to add a bit of JS/CSS to get the "satellites" hoverable to my liking. The library gives you circle regions and capsules, and you could wrap each in a link or button tag, but that still leaves dead space between the pie slices. I ended up using some trig and pointer handlers. Not sure if I missed part of the docs, or if that's a consideration for future Orbit versions. Still a great library though.
I believe that "satellites" have pointer-events set to none by default. I would think in some solution, maybe adding a CSS utility to change that in case is needed
After a long time working on this project, I'm finally ready to share the first public version of Orbit. Although there's still much to be done, I believe this project is ready to move beyond internal testing.
Orbit is a CSS framework that lets you create simple or complex radial designs and UIs, from pie charts to radial menus, and even fully radial pages.
Orbit is designed to be simple, extensible and compatible with other tools and frameworks, using space-related concepts.
Glad you like it! Several years ago, I wrote my first project, Zircle UI, which mixed zoomable navigation with circular UI. It was not flexible at all, but I enjoyed it and learned a lot from this experience. Then, I decided to split Zircle into two independent parts: Orbit for radial UI (I mean, not constrained to circular shapes), and Zumly, a JS zoomable WIP engine (https://github.com/zumerlab/zumly). While you can use both projects together, they can also be used independently
I’ve been super interested in zoomable interfaces for text - there was an interesting demo in a rust conference talk: https://youtu.be/rC4FCS-oMpg?si=h6xv3fgOXkBTXg3R (skip to 14:45 to see it in action)
I must confess that I don't have any experience in graphic design. I actually used existing examples that I thought were well-designed and tried to recreate them using Orbit to see if it was possible.
I wonder, could you make custom element alternatives to the .bigbang and .gravity-spot classes too? Then they could attach their own resize observers without requiring the developer to do so manually.
I was hesitant to develop custom elements at first because I wanted to use just CSS classes and custom variables. However, in certain cases, the developer experience is a mess without using custom elements. About your question, yes, I would make custom element alternatives.
