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Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

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Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#12

Post by brandonmenc »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #2

Anyone who has the new model w/ Touch Bar can comment on the usefulness of it, now that it's been out for a while? Do you ever used it / still use it daily?

I got a MBP this last refresh. I'm a programmer.

Touch Bar is a nice incremental advance. Not having a physical ESC key is not as bothersome as I expected. In fact, I don't notice it at all. Disclaimer: I don't use vi.

I like the media control modes, and am looking forward to content creation apps (ex: Ableton) making use of it.

I'd be sad if it were taken away, but it wouldn't prevent me from getting work done. It's a nice-to-have extra.

Also, the new keyboard is fantastic. I love the keys, and my external keyboard is now a buzzkill and I can't wait for Apple to refresh the Magic Keyboard with the new switches.

I have never accidentally hit the touch bar.

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#13

Post by banned1 »

ollieglass wrote: post #5
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #2

Anyone who has the new model w/ Touch Bar can comment on the usefulness of it, now that it's been out for a while? Do you ever used it / still use it daily?

Worse than useless. Adds no value and sometimes it crashes.

Debating whether to buy this model or stay away.

How do you ESC when this thing crashes?

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#15

Post by danso »

JakeWesorick wrote: post #3

Mac Touch Bar is useless. Does anyone actually use it? Would you rather have the touch bar or your escape key back?

I assume the Touch Bar and the corresponding decision to remove the ESC key is part of the strategy to make the transition between iOS and MacOS as seamless as possible, even if the 2 systems are never completely unified. I can't remember the last time I've ever used the ESC key in day-to-day computing but I notice its absence all the time when using the iPad Pro's smart cover keyboard.

I don't own a Touch Bar laptop myself but as someone who has to teach people how to use computers and applications, the Touch Bar bothers me as much as Microsoft Office's Ribbon toolbar, in which functionality somehow becomes even more difficult to memorize because of the seemingly arbitrary decision in how the context buttons are arranged (nevermind how they might change with each software update).

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#16

Post by saagarjha »

It's written in…Rust? That's interesting. How is it interacting with Cocoa?

EDIT: It looks like it's using the rubrail package, which links with the private DFRFoundation framework. rubrail itself is using the objc package. I think this code snippet from the README[1] is enough:

  let cls = Class::get("NSObject").unwrap();
  let obj: *mut Object = msg_send![cls, new];
  let hash: usize = msg_send![obj, hash];
  let is_kind: BOOL = msg_send![obj, isKindOfClass:cls];
  // Even void methods must have their return type annotated
  let _: () = msg_send![obj, release];
Ugh. Why?

[1]https://github.com/SSheldon/rust-objc

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#17

Post by pcestrada »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #2

Anyone who has the new model w/ Touch Bar can comment on the usefulness of it, now that it's been out for a while? Do you ever used it / still use it daily?

Not very useful at all. Few apps take advantage of it. The lack of a physical Escape key is also very annoying.

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#19

Post by scwoodal »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #2

Anyone who has the new model w/ Touch Bar can comment on the usefulness of it, now that it's been out for a while? Do you ever used it / still use it daily?

I had it on for a day and the constant context switching was annoying. I flipped the setting back so that the default toolbar (volume, esc, brightness etc) is always displayed.

I still don't like it at all. I'll sometimes look up while thinking and one of my fingers will accidentally be resting on the brightness dimmer. I'll look back down and my screen is black and I'm like WTF??! Only to realize where my finger was with no feedback I had done so.

I wish the touch bar would go away.

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#20

Post by doktrin »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #2

Anyone who has the new model w/ Touch Bar can comment on the usefulness of it, now that it's been out for a while? Do you ever used it / still use it daily?

I was issued a new gen MBP at work and have been supremely disappointed. The touch bar is (to me) a useless anti-feature, and am also completely dissatisfied with the new keyboard (reduced tactility across the board, varying tactility from key to key, a loud static noise emitted from the keys when the machine heats up, etc).

I went so far as to try to return this thing, but my employer wasn't willing to indulge me. The GPU upgrade and smaller form factor, to me, aren't worth the sub-par keyboard. If they allowed for more than 16GB of RAM the new models might be worthwhile, but as it stands I definitely do not recommend it as a work machine.

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