I guess this HN post will inevitably turn into about the MacBook Touch Bar, so I would like to contribute my opinion on this:
I've said this multiple times here now, but the Touch Bar is really a joy to use and very useful if you're not the person who's always using only Vim. My personal feeling is that the people who dislike the Touch Bar heard the bad things about it, tried it for a time and two, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word.
Text suggestion is super useful, the emoji selector is useful very much, text formatting controls are very useful, debugging controls are super useful (and much superior than fn keys), moving between tabs are super useful, etc... Really I can't understand all of the hate that the Touch Bar gets on HN.
And yes, you can touch-type on the Touch Bar, it's not context-sensitive enough to develop muscle memory. You can just reach out your finger from your keyboard without seeing when you're using a particular app. You get muscle memory on how to trash the files on the Finder, comment out a line or rename a variable in Xcode, control display or volumes, move between videos... (And you can type esc super-reliably without looking at all, so really 'You can't use Vim with the Touch Bar' is a bit exaggerated.)
One tip for all of the Touch Bar MBP users - you might want to install the app HapticKey[0], which is a very super useful app that provides haptic feedback on every Touch Bar touch. I consider this the biggest mistake on Apple's part - with haptic feedback it's much easier to develop muscle memory (although I did develop muscle memory without this app too).
I never comment, and I appreciate your view, but suffice it to say that I hate the Touch Bar enough that your comment has spurred me to post.
My company-issued laptop has a Touch Bar, and I can only imagine that it was invented and distributed by some kind of malicious clique of saboteurs within Apple who hate both (1) users and (2) Apple and want both to fail.
Brushing the Touch Bar accidentally with a finger leads Siri to interrupt me, silencing whatever video call I'm on or music I'm listening to. Instead of being able to adjust the volume manually or pause what I'm listening to with a key that I can press without looking, I have to flatten and retract my hands, peer down at the touchbar, and then poke through several options just in order to do a simple operation, all the while terrified that Siri will interrupt me.
This is the wrong audience to ask about the touch bar, however there is an entire population of computer users out there for whom standard function keys are less than useless.
>About 90 per cent of computer users don't use CTRL-F to search for a word - as they don't know such a keyboard shortcut exists, a Google survey found. The results stunned Google's Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness, Dan Russell.
"I think we just all assume that we all know it, but no one actually does."
For the 90% of users who don't know that Ctrl-F is find, having a row of contextual command icons for the foreground program instead of a row of useless function keys is a step up.
I think they should just continue to make standard function keys available for the minority of users who find them important to their own workflow.
> My personal feeling is that the people who dislike the Touch Bar heard the bad things about it, tried it for a time and two, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word.
That's a very roundabout way of saying "people tried it, hate it, and told others: UNFAIR." In essence that argument can be used to dismiss anyone who dislikes the Touch Bar because they MIGHT have read something negative about it at some point, and therefore have been corrupted from forming their own first-hand opinion (???).
I'd love to ignore the Touch Bar, but since they stole the F key row for it, I cannot. I am forced to use it to interact with software that once worked fine. Since there's no physical feedback, and the virtual keys aren't correctly aligned with the physical ones: it is a frustration. At least we regained the escape key.
As to why I don't actively use it: I look at the screen, not the top of my hands. The content is on the screen, if you can touch type you shouldn't ever be looking down, so the Touch Bar is an anti-feature put in completely the wrong location (i.e. above the keyboard, instead under the screen) for people who struggle to type.
However, there's also a class of users that _do not look at the keyboard_ (if only, for very specific complex actions which only require lookup and execution, not reflexion).
For this class of people at least, the _visual_ touch bar introduces an uncontrolled* modal change to the keyboard which is a true nature change of the role and expectations one can have of the keyboard.
That, in turn, may be a good enough reason to be very frustratred with it, and not use it at all.
As for me, I'm happy for, although I don't understand, people that appreciate the touch bar. And I don't use it. And I expect to get my next laptop without one.
* uncontrolled, because not triggered by the user.
> My personal feeling is that the people who dislike the Touch Bar heard the bad things about it, tried it for a time and two, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word.
Well then your personal feeling is really an untested assumption masquerading as a feeling.
I'm a long-time developer, and more recently, a designer of interfaces and graphics. Aside from my 20 years of muscle memory with vim, the primary reason I hate the Touch Bar is the same reason I hate touch screens in cars: if I have to look away from where I'm supposed to be looking because my controls provide no physical feedback, then that's a design failure. If you're going to provide this as an unobtrusive addition to the current features, then super... but they replaced standard functionality with something that was worse in many ways, and kinda neat in other, much less important ways. Much like when they suddenly replaced Google Maps on iPhones with Apple Maps before Google had their iOS app ready. Apple Maps had a much-touted gimmicky 3d flyover feature, but the users lost street view, transit, and bicycle directions and the directions themselves were significantly worse. Sure, it looked cool and the flyover feature was really neat... but who gives a damn if you're losing core functionality.
Within months of having my first MacBook Pro, I could turn the volume up and down and mute the audio without looking. Same with the screen brightness... I can't do that anymore. Not only that, but the interface for changing the volume— a core system function— changes depending on the current application's context, making me have to hunt for it. Maybe you don't run up against that, but it's inexcusably poor design.
In addition, the Touch Bar isn't big enough to be useful for any serious professional use in media editing apps, which seems to be what it was originally designed for. I can't use it to easily scrub through video clips with any precision, or large amounts of pictures, or anything like that. Sure, it might be a nice-to-have for a less intensive user, but it's certainly not a PROfessional tool for my MacBook PRO.
On top of that, it's totally useless for accessibility, it's easy to accidentally touch and do something unintended, and makes simple tap-n-times motions into awkward tap, wait, drag motions.
I accidentally tap it all the time. All it takes is a key press that’s slightly too high and the edge of my finger grazes the Touch Bar and BAM whatever shortcut was there runs.
I wanted to like the Touch Bar. I actually did for the first two weeks. Then I slowly grew to hate it once I realized I accidentally touched it more than intentionally.
I despised the early incarnation of the TouchBar. I live in Vim, and while I use a 'jj' binding for most Esc scenarios, I still need an actual Escape key. Beyond that, I had three brand-new MacBooks die in the first year with TouchBar failures. It also coincided with the disastrous new keyboard (multiple failures there too). It was enough to make me buy a ThinkPad and swear off literally all Apple products for a few years.
My new job just sent me a new MacBook, and I was dreading it. I'm happy to report that it has a physical Escape key (smaller and imperfect, but sufficient), and the keyboard feels better overall. I still don't want the TouchBar, and still get no use out of it, but it no longer enrages me. I'm open to accepting and even embracing it if I ever see a good use case. One thing that continues to bother me is that it changes as I'm typing, and I don't want that. But I can see a path for apps to use it in a positive way.
The touch bar is too sensitive. When just slighly brushing over it activates it then it is useless. Those are keys. And when I want to backspace and accidentically start some other action then this is a design flaw.
It needs to have a force touch, so that just hovering or touching it won't activate it. you need to press down. Until this is implemented the whole touch bar is just annoying.
Oh and when you need to use BetterTouchTool to actually make the touch bar useful then something is really wrong.
Alos use th same too to map fn+<> for volume up down and other things. just because looking for that on the touch bar is just ... stupid.
" My personal feeling is that the people who dislike the Touch Bar heard the bad things about it, tried it for a time and two, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word."
I have tried to for two years and still find it useless...
With Better Touch Tool I have basically recreated the old Fn key layout and now it's half-ways bearable. If they at least hadn't made it pure touch but something with resistance I wouldn't constantly hit it by accident...
Thanks for this contrary opinion. :) I have been using a Touch Bar MBP for about 18 months. I have my Touch Bar configured for function keys all the time. I touch type fairly quickly, so I rarely look at the keyboard. I spend all day in the terminal, Emacs, Vim, or my browser (which I navigate using the Vimium extension). Unlike you, I run into problems with the Touch Bar on a daily basis:
* I still hit the function keys at least a half dozen times a day by accident.
* I still manage to not register fast key presses to the Touch Bar at least half a dozen times a day by accident.
* About once a month, it seems, the Touch Bar gets stuck on its volume or brightness widget. Previously the only way I found to fix this was to reboot. Last night I may have discovered that touching other, seemingly blank parts of the Bar may get it out of this state, so at least the Touch Bar may no longer force me to reboot.
Text completion on my laptop usually slows me down, but in any case, my editor offers that for me inline, without me having to look down at the keyboard. I know all the shortcuts to delete files in Finder, comment out lines, rename variables, control volumes, change tabs, and control text formatting.
All this is to say that I guess I am not the target demographic for the Touch Bar—and, since all the new MBPs seem to have it, I guess I'm no longer the demographic for the MacBook Pro? I am inclined to agree with the comment from 'GeekyBear that I am probably in the vast minority of users, and most people will find use for the Touch Bar.
I am glad you find the Touch Bar useful. For my part, I hate it, and it's one factor that's got me looking for the exits on macOS.
I would like to second your suggestion to add haptic feedback to the Touch Bar. I use BetterTouchTool for this, and it helps me to know when I have accidentally hit the Touch Bar.
Also, I hate the Touch Bar, but Sampler looks really cool.
Interestingly enough, my experience has been the opposite. I liked the concept of the Touch Bar at first, then got one with a new macbook. I liked it at first, but the more I use it, the more I hate it. Yes I spent time using it, yes I customized its icons, yes, yes, yes. It's been more than 2 years I use it all day long. My next macbook will be the Air one, just so I don't have to use the Touch Bar again.
And I'm not even using F keys on regular keyboards.
For me it's not Vim (remapped caps lock to ESC, plus newer MBPs have a physical ESC key again), it's JetBrains.
The number of frequent operations that use F-keys makes the touch bar a truly frustrating experience.
I switched to a Matias keyboard to avoid the touch bar. An added benefit is their placement of the fn key, which is really nice if you use various OSes.
As a guy that started to use vim since 15-year-old and use it all the time, touchbar is still a joy to use. It took me less than half an hour to get used to the virtual esc and I hardly fail to press it correctly. iterm2's support of touchbar is charming and helps a lot even when using vim
I did find I had to customise the Firefox touchbar shortcuts so I don't brush them accidentally.
But I love things like how VS.Code puts common shortcuts as buttons instead of trying to make me remember them. I have better things to do with my memory than remember keyboard shortcuts.
the emoji selector, yes. everything else you’ve said is downright wrong. all of those are better with keyboard shortcuts and fn keys are better than the touchbar for that.
i specifically want to call out moving between tabs. in absolutely no way is the touchbar better than keyboard shortcuts. there is one app where it might be better: safari. because they chose such poor shortcut for switching tabs.
i guess there is one more good use case. if you allocated rarely used and hard to locate MS word buttons to the toolbar, that might be perhaps better than monkeying with the ribbon.
i have a streamdeck i use for IDE shortcuts. it’s far far better than the touchbar.
Easily explained: It's a keyboard, not a screen. I don't look at the keyboard when I use a computer, so a random, context-sensitive action which occurs when I randomly miss the number keys is extremely distressing.
Touch Bar is great for sliding, but terrible for button presses as it often rejects very quick button presses and of course you can't use it by feel.
90% of what I want out of the Touch Bar is the ability to slide up/down brightness or volume. For some reason they don't implement it that way - its either a double action of tapping to open sliders then sliding, or buttons that take several taps to adjust how I like.
Maybe my use cases are crazy... I just don't get it though. Glad to see someone trying to use it for what it offers.
I don't understand why anyone would prefer a volume slider to discrete up/down buttons. I almost never want to quickly slide to a specific volume, it's always "this is a little too loud" or "I didn't quite hear that."
The action I want is a quick relative tick up or down, then listen again to see if the improvement is adequate, then repeat as necessary until it's perfect.
Sliders are good for quickly moving by a large amount to a rough absolute position. But they're utter crap for fine adjustment.
Am I the only one who gets infuriated when trying to get to the exact spot I want by rolling my finger ever so slightly to get a slider to move by half a pixel? It takes forever and it gives you RSI!
You can tap and immediately slide without lifting your finger to do that! I feel the same way and this is the closest thing the touchbar has to a killer feature.
maybe i am misunderstanding you but to change the volume, or brightness sliders, you don't need to lift your finger to adjust the slider. Once you click the volume button you can slide your finger without ever picking it up. only realized it myself after a friends told me - it never seemed that obvious
Volume control taking 2 taps is a bit crazy to me, but I'll bet in testing they found that people brushed against the volume bar too much if it was always there. I accidentaly graze the "play" button often. I'd love to see if "buttons with screens on them" might work out better for me, then I could lock the top-right ones to the media controls. Maybe leave a small slider on the top-left or middle.
Honestly I've just picked up a cheap(ish) audio interface (mine is an M-Audio 192|4) and now I have a giant knob that I can use to get the perfect volume, and as a bonus, it disables the volume keys on the touchbar so I don't keep bashing them when typing.
This may be the first interesting/good use for the Touch Bar many HN'ers have seen.
But the touchbar was designed primarily for AV professionals from the beginning -- sliding controls for filmstrips, audio sliders, colors, etc.
It's just that most developers have never needed to do any work like that, and have never used the creative apps that expose this, so don't see the point.
But it's genuinely for the "professional" part of Pro. Not develop professionals, but creative professionals.
Little apps like this demonstrate why the touchbar really is a useful user interface for certain things.
Had Apple had the good sense to introduce it without removing an entire row of keys used heavily by the developers tasked with writing software for it it might have actually worked out.
I’ll probably get downvoted to Hades here but I finally upgraded my mid 2012 retina MacBook Pro to the latest model and I quite like the touch bar. Yes I know pure keyboard commands are more efficient but at this point in life my available bandwidth for memorizing too many app specific keyboard chords is limited. It’s nice to just tap “leave” when in a Zoom call or “pause” when playing music.
So cool! If you're into that kind of stuff I strongly recommend trying out this little gem https://urbanlienert.com/miditouchbar/ It's a touchbar midi-keyboard, it displays two full octaves and also has some other controls like volume and panning for the current channel and some others. But I mostly use the keyboard only and it works great with Ableton Live. Much better than one octave on your computer keyboard when you want to play while laying on a couch with your laptop! I'm really happy I've found it and it makes the touchbar really useful for me.
For me, only Pock [0] comes close to a possibly or passingly ergonomic use case for the Touch Bar. (Not hating on vim.)
Hard-wired function keys as abstraction are cognitive overhead even if mechanically efficient.
Touch Bar ignores ergonomics (screen to bar to screen) and what should be up (interface queues) is down (enemy of touch-typing). Cognitive overhead and mechanically inefficient (no muscle memory).
I've just started using a 2020 MacBook Pro. I was previously very apprehensive about the touchbar (in fact, it was a key reason for me avoiding getting one for some time).
A few days in, I'm super impressed with it, and think it is able to offer subtle but effective workflow improvements within applications. (I think I'd find it frustrating if I had an older version with no hardware escape key though).
I don't have a MacBook, but one thing that comes to mind reading the discussions about this is the complaint of the function keys going away, and whether there's a way to improve the default experience anyway. I use a 60% keyboard, so if I want to hit f1 or f2, I'm hitting an FN key + one of the numbers. I've used this keyboard for years and I really like it.
Can you do this in software on Mac OS? Add a bunch of FN+key actions so that you could use the keyboard more like a 60%? Then the touchbar would be more like configurable macro keys and less like a daring replacement of core functionality.
I will say it probably wouldn't work as well on a laptop keyboard. I can hit my FN key on my Pok3r with the side of my hand because of there being a drop in space below the keyboard, which you don't get on a laptop because the body continues and there's an area for a trackpad. Same story for hitting things like the ctrl key.
I get that a lot of folks here are engaging in what they view as "healthy design criticism," but, as a creative professional who does not have the budget for such a machine, it's hard to see most of the complaints here as anything more than privileged whining and failure to adapt to changing tools.
Laptops (and more broadly, personal computers) are designed as general purpose machines; no knowledge of the end-user is assumed. There may be a pool of activities a hardware designer may expect to take place on the machine, but designing for any one of them in particular is likely to come at a detriment to the others.
Special purpose tools exist for a reason, and perhaps such is needed in the "Programmer's Laptop" space, but criticizing a general purpose tool for not being purpose-built for a specific application is ridiculous.
Minor nitpick, but it's "Samplr" and not "Sampler". Samplr is a fairly well known sampler application for the ipad. When I clicked the link I was wondering if it was Samplr, or someone copying the same idea.
Very awesome idea though. Samplr for iPad is an absolutely amazing app which is both a great musical idea and great demo of using a touch-screen for innovative musical usage. I don't have a touchbar Mac, but have to agree with all the other comments here saying this is the best usage I've seen of the touch bar so far.
For those us without touchbars (or even an apple machine), but who might have been wondering just how far you could go if you really tried to make the mouse into an expressive musical instrument:
The Touch Bar should have been right below the screen, where I actually see it. Otherwise I need to interrupt my flow by looking at it. I’ve made it somewhat more useful with Pock (using negative spacing) but still not blown away by it.
This kind of application and many other uses would be so much better if it was like a part of the screen instead of the keyboard.
I didn't mind my MBP's touchbar until it randomly stopped working two years in. Now it just sporadically flashes an annoying bar of bright white light, so it's completely covered in electrical tape to block that from view. So, my experience with it has overwhelmingly been negative.
[+] [-] pcr910303|5 years ago|reply
I've said this multiple times here now, but the Touch Bar is really a joy to use and very useful if you're not the person who's always using only Vim. My personal feeling is that the people who dislike the Touch Bar heard the bad things about it, tried it for a time and two, decided that it's not something good, and spreading the word.
Text suggestion is super useful, the emoji selector is useful very much, text formatting controls are very useful, debugging controls are super useful (and much superior than fn keys), moving between tabs are super useful, etc... Really I can't understand all of the hate that the Touch Bar gets on HN.
And yes, you can touch-type on the Touch Bar, it's not context-sensitive enough to develop muscle memory. You can just reach out your finger from your keyboard without seeing when you're using a particular app. You get muscle memory on how to trash the files on the Finder, comment out a line or rename a variable in Xcode, control display or volumes, move between videos... (And you can type esc super-reliably without looking at all, so really 'You can't use Vim with the Touch Bar' is a bit exaggerated.)
One tip for all of the Touch Bar MBP users - you might want to install the app HapticKey[0], which is a very super useful app that provides haptic feedback on every Touch Bar touch. I consider this the biggest mistake on Apple's part - with haptic feedback it's much easier to develop muscle memory (although I did develop muscle memory without this app too).
[0]: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey - or you might like 'brew cask install haptickey'.
[+] [-] bedbot|5 years ago|reply
My company-issued laptop has a Touch Bar, and I can only imagine that it was invented and distributed by some kind of malicious clique of saboteurs within Apple who hate both (1) users and (2) Apple and want both to fail.
Brushing the Touch Bar accidentally with a finger leads Siri to interrupt me, silencing whatever video call I'm on or music I'm listening to. Instead of being able to adjust the volume manually or pause what I'm listening to with a key that I can press without looking, I have to flatten and retract my hands, peer down at the touchbar, and then poke through several options just in order to do a simple operation, all the while terrified that Siri will interrupt me.
[+] [-] GeekyBear|5 years ago|reply
>About 90 per cent of computer users don't use CTRL-F to search for a word - as they don't know such a keyboard shortcut exists, a Google survey found. The results stunned Google's Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness, Dan Russell.
"I think we just all assume that we all know it, but no one actually does."
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/only-one-in-10-know-what-c...
For the 90% of users who don't know that Ctrl-F is find, having a row of contextual command icons for the foreground program instead of a row of useless function keys is a step up.
I think they should just continue to make standard function keys available for the minority of users who find them important to their own workflow.
[+] [-] Someone1234|5 years ago|reply
That's a very roundabout way of saying "people tried it, hate it, and told others: UNFAIR." In essence that argument can be used to dismiss anyone who dislikes the Touch Bar because they MIGHT have read something negative about it at some point, and therefore have been corrupted from forming their own first-hand opinion (???).
I'd love to ignore the Touch Bar, but since they stole the F key row for it, I cannot. I am forced to use it to interact with software that once worked fine. Since there's no physical feedback, and the virtual keys aren't correctly aligned with the physical ones: it is a frustration. At least we regained the escape key.
As to why I don't actively use it: I look at the screen, not the top of my hands. The content is on the screen, if you can touch type you shouldn't ever be looking down, so the Touch Bar is an anti-feature put in completely the wrong location (i.e. above the keyboard, instead under the screen) for people who struggle to type.
[+] [-] Juliate|5 years ago|reply
However, there's also a class of users that _do not look at the keyboard_ (if only, for very specific complex actions which only require lookup and execution, not reflexion).
For this class of people at least, the _visual_ touch bar introduces an uncontrolled* modal change to the keyboard which is a true nature change of the role and expectations one can have of the keyboard.
That, in turn, may be a good enough reason to be very frustratred with it, and not use it at all.
As for me, I'm happy for, although I don't understand, people that appreciate the touch bar. And I don't use it. And I expect to get my next laptop without one.
* uncontrolled, because not triggered by the user.
[+] [-] chefandy|5 years ago|reply
Well then your personal feeling is really an untested assumption masquerading as a feeling.
I'm a long-time developer, and more recently, a designer of interfaces and graphics. Aside from my 20 years of muscle memory with vim, the primary reason I hate the Touch Bar is the same reason I hate touch screens in cars: if I have to look away from where I'm supposed to be looking because my controls provide no physical feedback, then that's a design failure. If you're going to provide this as an unobtrusive addition to the current features, then super... but they replaced standard functionality with something that was worse in many ways, and kinda neat in other, much less important ways. Much like when they suddenly replaced Google Maps on iPhones with Apple Maps before Google had their iOS app ready. Apple Maps had a much-touted gimmicky 3d flyover feature, but the users lost street view, transit, and bicycle directions and the directions themselves were significantly worse. Sure, it looked cool and the flyover feature was really neat... but who gives a damn if you're losing core functionality.
Within months of having my first MacBook Pro, I could turn the volume up and down and mute the audio without looking. Same with the screen brightness... I can't do that anymore. Not only that, but the interface for changing the volume— a core system function— changes depending on the current application's context, making me have to hunt for it. Maybe you don't run up against that, but it's inexcusably poor design.
In addition, the Touch Bar isn't big enough to be useful for any serious professional use in media editing apps, which seems to be what it was originally designed for. I can't use it to easily scrub through video clips with any precision, or large amounts of pictures, or anything like that. Sure, it might be a nice-to-have for a less intensive user, but it's certainly not a PROfessional tool for my MacBook PRO.
On top of that, it's totally useless for accessibility, it's easy to accidentally touch and do something unintended, and makes simple tap-n-times motions into awkward tap, wait, drag motions.
All set. Throw it away. Give me my buttons back.
[+] [-] stanmancan|5 years ago|reply
I wanted to like the Touch Bar. I actually did for the first two weeks. Then I slowly grew to hate it once I realized I accidentally touched it more than intentionally.
[+] [-] djxfade|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/thomas-alrek/TouchMemes/
[+] [-] caymanjim|5 years ago|reply
My new job just sent me a new MacBook, and I was dreading it. I'm happy to report that it has a physical Escape key (smaller and imperfect, but sufficient), and the keyboard feels better overall. I still don't want the TouchBar, and still get no use out of it, but it no longer enrages me. I'm open to accepting and even embracing it if I ever see a good use case. One thing that continues to bother me is that it changes as I'm typing, and I don't want that. But I can see a path for apps to use it in a positive way.
[+] [-] siquick|5 years ago|reply
This is great, thanks for posting.
[+] [-] gullevek|5 years ago|reply
It needs to have a force touch, so that just hovering or touching it won't activate it. you need to press down. Until this is implemented the whole touch bar is just annoying.
Oh and when you need to use BetterTouchTool to actually make the touch bar useful then something is really wrong.
Alos use th same too to map fn+<> for volume up down and other things. just because looking for that on the touch bar is just ... stupid.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|5 years ago|reply
I have tried to for two years and still find it useless...
With Better Touch Tool I have basically recreated the old Fn key layout and now it's half-ways bearable. If they at least hadn't made it pure touch but something with resistance I wouldn't constantly hit it by accident...
[+] [-] draebek|5 years ago|reply
* I still hit the function keys at least a half dozen times a day by accident.
* I still manage to not register fast key presses to the Touch Bar at least half a dozen times a day by accident.
* About once a month, it seems, the Touch Bar gets stuck on its volume or brightness widget. Previously the only way I found to fix this was to reboot. Last night I may have discovered that touching other, seemingly blank parts of the Bar may get it out of this state, so at least the Touch Bar may no longer force me to reboot.
Text completion on my laptop usually slows me down, but in any case, my editor offers that for me inline, without me having to look down at the keyboard. I know all the shortcuts to delete files in Finder, comment out lines, rename variables, control volumes, change tabs, and control text formatting.
All this is to say that I guess I am not the target demographic for the Touch Bar—and, since all the new MBPs seem to have it, I guess I'm no longer the demographic for the MacBook Pro? I am inclined to agree with the comment from 'GeekyBear that I am probably in the vast minority of users, and most people will find use for the Touch Bar.
I am glad you find the Touch Bar useful. For my part, I hate it, and it's one factor that's got me looking for the exits on macOS.
I would like to second your suggestion to add haptic feedback to the Touch Bar. I use BetterTouchTool for this, and it helps me to know when I have accidentally hit the Touch Bar.
Also, I hate the Touch Bar, but Sampler looks really cool.
[+] [-] hashmal|5 years ago|reply
And I'm not even using F keys on regular keyboards.
[+] [-] ldavison|5 years ago|reply
The number of frequent operations that use F-keys makes the touch bar a truly frustrating experience.
I switched to a Matias keyboard to avoid the touch bar. An added benefit is their placement of the fn key, which is really nice if you use various OSes.
[+] [-] jerryzh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|5 years ago|reply
I did find I had to customise the Firefox touchbar shortcuts so I don't brush them accidentally.
But I love things like how VS.Code puts common shortcuts as buttons instead of trying to make me remember them. I have better things to do with my memory than remember keyboard shortcuts.
[+] [-] whoisjuan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techslave|5 years ago|reply
i specifically want to call out moving between tabs. in absolutely no way is the touchbar better than keyboard shortcuts. there is one app where it might be better: safari. because they chose such poor shortcut for switching tabs.
i guess there is one more good use case. if you allocated rarely used and hard to locate MS word buttons to the toolbar, that might be perhaps better than monkeying with the ribbon.
i have a streamdeck i use for IDE shortcuts. it’s far far better than the touchbar.
[+] [-] yc-kraln|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EamonnMR|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigzero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltasquared|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PostThisTooFast|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] npunt|5 years ago|reply
90% of what I want out of the Touch Bar is the ability to slide up/down brightness or volume. For some reason they don't implement it that way - its either a double action of tapping to open sliders then sliding, or buttons that take several taps to adjust how I like.
Maybe my use cases are crazy... I just don't get it though. Glad to see someone trying to use it for what it offers.
[+] [-] ohazi|5 years ago|reply
The action I want is a quick relative tick up or down, then listen again to see if the improvement is adequate, then repeat as necessary until it's perfect.
Sliders are good for quickly moving by a large amount to a rough absolute position. But they're utter crap for fine adjustment.
Am I the only one who gets infuriated when trying to get to the exact spot I want by rolling my finger ever so slightly to get a slider to move by half a pixel? It takes forever and it gives you RSI!
[+] [-] ericwood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rillweed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funnypants|5 years ago|reply
https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...
[+] [-] taurath|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] antihero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
But the touchbar was designed primarily for AV professionals from the beginning -- sliding controls for filmstrips, audio sliders, colors, etc.
It's just that most developers have never needed to do any work like that, and have never used the creative apps that expose this, so don't see the point.
But it's genuinely for the "professional" part of Pro. Not develop professionals, but creative professionals.
[+] [-] eksu|5 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fMlmzTBF_LE
[+] [-] donatj|5 years ago|reply
I'm also sad that it requires Catilina, I'm stuck on Mojave for the time being thanks to a number of 32 bit apps I depend on.
[+] [-] gorkish|5 years ago|reply
Had Apple had the good sense to introduce it without removing an entire row of keys used heavily by the developers tasked with writing software for it it might have actually worked out.
[+] [-] jshaqaw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iliaznk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mshaler|5 years ago|reply
Hard-wired function keys as abstraction are cognitive overhead even if mechanically efficient.
Touch Bar ignores ergonomics (screen to bar to screen) and what should be up (interface queues) is down (enemy of touch-typing). Cognitive overhead and mechanically inefficient (no muscle memory).
Not worse than QWERTY but still...
[0]: https://pock.dev (no affiliation)
[+] [-] below43|5 years ago|reply
A few days in, I'm super impressed with it, and think it is able to offer subtle but effective workflow improvements within applications. (I think I'd find it frustrating if I had an older version with no hardware escape key though).
[+] [-] _bxg1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albatross|5 years ago|reply
- Complains
I get that a lot of folks here are engaging in what they view as "healthy design criticism," but, as a creative professional who does not have the budget for such a machine, it's hard to see most of the complaints here as anything more than privileged whining and failure to adapt to changing tools.
Laptops (and more broadly, personal computers) are designed as general purpose machines; no knowledge of the end-user is assumed. There may be a pool of activities a hardware designer may expect to take place on the machine, but designing for any one of them in particular is likely to come at a detriment to the others.
Special purpose tools exist for a reason, and perhaps such is needed in the "Programmer's Laptop" space, but criticizing a general purpose tool for not being purpose-built for a specific application is ridiculous.
Edit: because i English bad
[+] [-] squeaky-clean|5 years ago|reply
Very awesome idea though. Samplr for iPad is an absolutely amazing app which is both a great musical idea and great demo of using a touch-screen for innovative musical usage. I don't have a touchbar Mac, but have to agree with all the other comments here saying this is the best usage I've seen of the touch bar so far.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|5 years ago|reply
DiN is Noise:
https://dinisnoise.org/?what=screenshots https://dinisnoise.org/
[+] [-] dep_b|5 years ago|reply
This kind of application and many other uses would be so much better if it was like a part of the screen instead of the keyboard.
[+] [-] binarynate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lasryaric|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dml2135|5 years ago|reply