I'm not sure the article author really understands how the Touch Bar works.
> I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how it could act as a Rainmeter or MenuMeters-like at-a-glance view of my machine.
People are going to experiment with toys for the Touch Bar, sure, but nobody's going to actually try and publish a game for one. Not only would the audience be very small, but the Touch Bar itself is so limited that you're not going to be able to make a game for it that's worth buying. However, normal games can and should use the Touch Bar to extend the keyboard to do great stuff (e.g. RPGs could put Inventory, Character Sheet, Skills, etc as buttons on the Touch Bar, or use it as an alternative input for controlling some types of abilities).
As for MenuMeters-like at-a-glance, this is why I say the author doesn't seem to understand how it works, because the only way you could have an at-a-glance view in the Touch Bar is if you actually put focus on the app that provides it. You cannot have a background app that provides Touch Bar content (like you can for stuff in the menubar). The foreground app controls what's on the Touch Bar. So the only way to have at-a-glance meters on it is if the foreground app is the one providing those meters. And if you have to put focus on a particular app to see your meters, then it's not really at-a-glance after all, and it would be quicker and easier (and actually usable for people without Touch Bars) to simply have that app show the status on the screen when you give it focus.
The RPG idea is something that has been tried for ages - the earliest example I can remember is the "Chocobo World" minigame on specific interactive memory cartridges for Final Fantasy VIII for the Playstation I. More recent examples include the Game Boy integration with the Wii and the default controller screen for the Wii U console.
None of these attempts ended up being very successful with the exception of the wildly successful Nintendo DS, which is different in a lot of ways (in that the real estate size between the touch screen and the real screen is equal).
The objection that a lot of people here have to the touch bar is that it's a sort-of-nice-to-have, never-essential feature used on very few machines, and these are the sorts of features that developers instinctively smell danger around.
I'm not sure how it is on Mac. But it's pretty trivial to get any exe in windows to run as a child of some tools.
E.g. I wrote a personal packet manipulator for visual studio. And added a registry key. So whenever you open any Devenv.exe it launches my program with devenv as an argument. To a normal person it's 100% not noticeable. But I'm the parent and could in this example perhaps Control the touchbar.
Tl Dr you can probably wrap a utility around other programs to have passive use. And/or inject tweak how controlbar looks at active window. Just force it to not update after its locked on.
> Who wouldn’t want a stock ticker there, or a Twitter feed, or a progress bar for downloads and file operations? There are plenty of possibilities to explore here, and it seems a disservice to insist that things remain monochrome, key-shaped and static.
No Mac user has ever thought "gee, this third party design is so much more tasteful than something that follows the HIG!" Apple is right to keep designers on a tight leash.
A stock ticker or Twitter feed sound just awful to me. Hopefully when developers find a way to ship features like that, I have a way to remove that crap.
Only the foreground app gets to put things in the touch bar. Excellent - I don't want some background process putting animated ads there.
Beyond that, Apple can't possibly limit what the foreground app does. Distribute your tasteless animating app with a Developer ID cert, and annoy people to your heart's content.
I do want a screensaver that also uses the touch bar. Nyan Cat is acceptable in this context.
How many negative posts about the new MacBook have graced the front-page of HN since the announcement? It feels like a lot.
I don't really understand the degree of animosity that the new MBP is drawing. Apple isn't, nor have they ever really been, the makers of the ultimate dev machine. They were always just the company that makes a laptop with decent power that was actually a laptop (not a desktop with a hinge in the back) which ran a unix that was, for many, more pleasant to use than linux. That hasn't changed with this release.
Would I like them to maybe be a little less obsessive about thinness if it meant getting a keyboard with a bit more travel? Sure.
Do I think that maybe a 32GB of RAM might not be quite the battery-killing trade-off that Phil implies? Kinda. Do I expect Apple to give me the option to make that choice on my own? Not a chance.
And when it comes to the Touch Bar, I didn't really expect Apple to make this a free-for-all for developers. They've long had this tendency to want to control how developers use these new features to ensure that it doesn't get away from their vision. But will someone figure out how to hack the Touch Bar and make it do some very interesting things? Oh, absolutely.
For a number of years, a lot of developers considered Apple hardware to be the best-available dev machine (powerful hardware with nice design, good connectivity, pleasant but powerful OS? Nice). I think that it was a result of coincidence. Developers aren't really who they're targeting, but coincidentally computers that were nice for their market were also nice dev machines.
I expect Apple to design for their intended customers. I also expect devs that liked the coincidentally-nice Apple hardware to complain when Apple's designs drift away from devs' requirements. I don't expect the complaints to change anything, but I expect them to be loud and all over the place for a little while.
If apple let you build iOS apps without a mac I wouldn't be so grumpy. As it is apple's choices effect me without there being any recourse, because my development machine has to be a mac (for work, anyway).
If I understand correctly it's like the Menu Bar, so only the application that's currently in focus will get to display stuff on it; they won't be able to hijack it from the background.
Frankly, if an app insists on showing me ads while I'm using it, I'd rather that they be on the Touch Bar instead of the main screen.
Now, admittedly, some of these things could be annoying or pulled off poorly.
This is one of the things that Apple has always been serious about doing right. Generally, devs who complain about this class of things are proved wrong in a few years. (Remember all of the outrage about background processes from the 2nd gen iPhone era?)
That said, even Apple is getting less Apple-y in this regard.
Several screenshots show that a escape key can be placed on the touch bar by apps that need it (e.g. Terminal).
There's certainly a good argument that physical keys are better, due to tactile positioning and response. But there's still a virtual escape "key".
(And on a related note: Folks could make the same argument about the F13/F14/F15/Help buttons that are traditionally on a Mac keyboard. Or the lack of Print Screen/Break/Scroll Lock from Apple keyboards in general. Keyboard layouts actually do change with time. Heck, look at the "Space Cadet Keyboard" from an MIT Lisp machine to see how much things have changed.)
I've read a TON of pushback on HN about the new touch bar. After reading this article it dawned on me -- the reason I hate the touch bar is because it isn't tactile. Instead of feeling for the volume up/mute/lightness up/down buttons, I'll have to stick my face into my keyboard to know what I'm pressing.
My solution would be allowing individual pressable physical keys to be changed via LED display, so that I can still feel them, but developers can modify what that key means. Yeah this would disable "sliding" which I don't care about.. is anyone with me on this? I hate having to look at things.
I like the idea of having physical keys having their own screens but I definitely still like sliding as well. It's extremely useful for scrubbing through video, photo albums, photo adjustment sliders, etc.
I'm kind of OK with this. Yea I think that there are a ton of really cool/interesting things that could be done with the touch bar, but given that it serves the important role of being the power button and controlling user access via TouchID, I really wouldn't want to risk either of those functionalities even if it means less "fun".
This article is very misleading. Apple has always had UI guidelines (HIG); that doesn't mean they ban apps that don't follow them. It's a recommendation, not a proscription.
Given they showed some pretty interactive demos in the keynote, I'm thinking it's all allowed if you're Apple but 3rd-party developers should be concerned.
Given that displays favor landscape over portrait, there's a lot of free space above the numbers. My bet is that the next iteration will have the function keys and the touch bar after the alienation of developers becomes apparent to Apple.
Has anyone here used the touchbar in person? I'm interested to know how easy it is to touch individual controls on the bar. Like can you be in the middle of typing and hit the keys or do you have to stop and poke at it.
FWIW, the guidelines suggest not using the Touch Bar as an output device, i.e. as an extension of the screen, not that you shouldn't use it as an input device. Pong paddle control should still be an acceptable use of the bar.
[+] [-] eridius|9 years ago|reply
> I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how it could act as a Rainmeter or MenuMeters-like at-a-glance view of my machine.
People are going to experiment with toys for the Touch Bar, sure, but nobody's going to actually try and publish a game for one. Not only would the audience be very small, but the Touch Bar itself is so limited that you're not going to be able to make a game for it that's worth buying. However, normal games can and should use the Touch Bar to extend the keyboard to do great stuff (e.g. RPGs could put Inventory, Character Sheet, Skills, etc as buttons on the Touch Bar, or use it as an alternative input for controlling some types of abilities).
As for MenuMeters-like at-a-glance, this is why I say the author doesn't seem to understand how it works, because the only way you could have an at-a-glance view in the Touch Bar is if you actually put focus on the app that provides it. You cannot have a background app that provides Touch Bar content (like you can for stuff in the menubar). The foreground app controls what's on the Touch Bar. So the only way to have at-a-glance meters on it is if the foreground app is the one providing those meters. And if you have to put focus on a particular app to see your meters, then it's not really at-a-glance after all, and it would be quicker and easier (and actually usable for people without Touch Bars) to simply have that app show the status on the screen when you give it focus.
[+] [-] no_wave|9 years ago|reply
None of these attempts ended up being very successful with the exception of the wildly successful Nintendo DS, which is different in a lot of ways (in that the real estate size between the touch screen and the real screen is equal).
The objection that a lot of people here have to the touch bar is that it's a sort-of-nice-to-have, never-essential feature used on very few machines, and these are the sorts of features that developers instinctively smell danger around.
[+] [-] Namrog84|9 years ago|reply
E.g. I wrote a personal packet manipulator for visual studio. And added a registry key. So whenever you open any Devenv.exe it launches my program with devenv as an argument. To a normal person it's 100% not noticeable. But I'm the parent and could in this example perhaps Control the touchbar.
Tl Dr you can probably wrap a utility around other programs to have passive use. And/or inject tweak how controlbar looks at active window. Just force it to not update after its locked on.
[+] [-] awesomerobot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply
No Mac user has ever thought "gee, this third party design is so much more tasteful than something that follows the HIG!" Apple is right to keep designers on a tight leash.
[+] [-] pcwalton|9 years ago|reply
Apple stopped following the HIG a long time ago. Even Gruber admitted it back in 2011. http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/uniformity_vs_individualit...
That article, by the way, is about a good counterexample to your point (Twitter for Mac).
[+] [-] c54|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cuddlybacon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qyv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefastlane|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delinka|9 years ago|reply
Beyond that, Apple can't possibly limit what the foreground app does. Distribute your tasteless animating app with a Developer ID cert, and annoy people to your heart's content.
I do want a screensaver that also uses the touch bar. Nyan Cat is acceptable in this context.
[+] [-] Spivak|9 years ago|reply
If you are legitimately worried about this then I am in horror of what software you're running on your computer.
I could understand having it require user approval but forbidding it entirely seems short sighted.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|9 years ago|reply
If someone can borrow me a new Mac, I'll happily work on getting nyan-mode for Emacs to display there. ;).
[+] [-] pyrophane|9 years ago|reply
I don't really understand the degree of animosity that the new MBP is drawing. Apple isn't, nor have they ever really been, the makers of the ultimate dev machine. They were always just the company that makes a laptop with decent power that was actually a laptop (not a desktop with a hinge in the back) which ran a unix that was, for many, more pleasant to use than linux. That hasn't changed with this release.
Would I like them to maybe be a little less obsessive about thinness if it meant getting a keyboard with a bit more travel? Sure.
Do I think that maybe a 32GB of RAM might not be quite the battery-killing trade-off that Phil implies? Kinda. Do I expect Apple to give me the option to make that choice on my own? Not a chance.
And when it comes to the Touch Bar, I didn't really expect Apple to make this a free-for-all for developers. They've long had this tendency to want to control how developers use these new features to ensure that it doesn't get away from their vision. But will someone figure out how to hack the Touch Bar and make it do some very interesting things? Oh, absolutely.
[+] [-] khedoros1|9 years ago|reply
I expect Apple to design for their intended customers. I also expect devs that liked the coincidentally-nice Apple hardware to complain when Apple's designs drift away from devs' requirements. I don't expect the complaints to change anything, but I expect them to be loud and all over the place for a little while.
[+] [-] overgard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gosubpl|9 years ago|reply
I don't think we can call that obsession. And please note that both Asus and Samsung have keyboards with around 2mm travel - laptop standard.
[+] [-] dvcc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mortenjorck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|9 years ago|reply
Frankly, if an app insists on showing me ads while I'm using it, I'd rather that they be on the Touch Bar instead of the main screen.
[+] [-] guywithabike|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wesleytodd|9 years ago|reply
Typical Apple restricting the ecosystem. Guess we all knew what we were getting ourselves into.
[+] [-] st3v3r|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinus_hn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|9 years ago|reply
This is one of the things that Apple has always been serious about doing right. Generally, devs who complain about this class of things are proved wrong in a few years. (Remember all of the outrage about background processes from the 2nd gen iPhone era?)
That said, even Apple is getting less Apple-y in this regard.
[+] [-] kemiller2002|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjohns|9 years ago|reply
There's certainly a good argument that physical keys are better, due to tactile positioning and response. But there's still a virtual escape "key".
(And on a related note: Folks could make the same argument about the F13/F14/F15/Help buttons that are traditionally on a Mac keyboard. Or the lack of Print Screen/Break/Scroll Lock from Apple keyboards in general. Keyboard layouts actually do change with time. Heck, look at the "Space Cadet Keyboard" from an MIT Lisp machine to see how much things have changed.)
[+] [-] eridius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccvannorman|9 years ago|reply
My solution would be allowing individual pressable physical keys to be changed via LED display, so that I can still feel them, but developers can modify what that key means. Yeah this would disable "sliding" which I don't care about.. is anyone with me on this? I hate having to look at things.
[+] [-] bcheung|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strictnein|9 years ago|reply
There's a whole bunch of cool keyboard products with various types of screens:
http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/
[+] [-] kprybol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comex|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skeptic2718|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cphoover|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabrika|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orbitingpluto|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|9 years ago|reply
I want function keys there. I have a perfectly good screen to show all that other fluff on.
[+] [-] msane|9 years ago|reply
How did
"Let's add TouchID to the MacBook!"
become
"Let's get rid of escape, power, function keys, volume, brightness, media controls ... and replace it with a second tiny screen!"
?
[+] [-] bcheung|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WiseWeasel|9 years ago|reply