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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

#51

Post by Osiris »

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?

The problem is that most apps displays things in the Touch Bar that are already visible / accessible on the screen via mouse.

It also gets rid of F-keys which makes it really hard to use a lot of shortcuts in my IDE (because I have to look down to see where the F-key is)

The Touch Bar would be more useful if it was used to make features discoverable that aren't already on the screen.

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#52

Post by Osiris »

wambotron wrote: post #40
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 have one for work and absolutely hate it. No tactile feedback at all, so it's easy to mis-hit a key. I also echo the guy who said he accidentally hits Siri now because of it. It happened to me A LOT until I realized you can change what shows on it by default. Now I keep mine with expanded controls at all time. It's still annoying because I have to look down to be able to press the right key. I prefer having physica…

"stuck" -> The tiniest bits of dust or crumbs makes keys still and not work. It's super annoying to blow on the keyboard to try to get a key to start working again.

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#53

Post by joombaga »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #37
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'm a developer and one of my work laptops is a MBP 13 inch w/ touchbar. I wasn't a huge Apple fan to begin with, but I used one of the last gen 17 inch MBP's for work, for about 2 years and liked it mostly because of the excellent hardware, specifically the keyboard and trackpad. The new keyboard is absolutely terrible though. Genuinely the second worst keyboard I've ever used. The new switches have caused dramatica…

Are you sure it's the switches? Did you move from a 17 inch to a 13 inch? I'd think that would contribute more to your troubles. Is the layout/key density significantly different?

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#54

Post by Osiris »

marcosscriven wrote: post #46

If they wanted the top row to be flexible, I would have prefered individual keys with an eink-style surface that could change, but would look completely normal otherwise.

It would be nice if it were like the Optimus keyboard [1], but I understand why they didn't do it. I would remove a lot of flexibility for sliders and variable size keys.

[1] http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#57

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

saagarjha wrote: post #16

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:…

That's basically what Objective-C code looks like when desugared to C.

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#58

Post by metrognome »

brandonmenc wrote: post #12
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…

The Magic Keyboard does have the new switches, or at least the first generation butterfly switches that the first generation MacBook had. Also, there is more key travel on the Magic Keyboard than on the MacBook or the MacBook Pro.

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#59

Post by brandall10 »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #37
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'm a developer and one of my work laptops is a MBP 13 inch w/ touchbar. I wasn't a huge Apple fan to begin with, but I used one of the last gen 17 inch MBP's for work, for about 2 years and liked it mostly because of the excellent hardware, specifically the keyboard and trackpad. The new keyboard is absolutely terrible though. Genuinely the second worst keyboard I've ever used. The new switches have caused dramatica…

I've had mine for 9 months and on the whole I feel like I'm a bit faster typing than my previous MBP although I haven't actually instrumented that.

One thing I find is the keyswitches do seem to collect bits of dirt/crumbs and the like around the edges, and when that happens some become a bit sticky or dead feeling which definitely leads to typing issues. I give mine a good cleaning on a weekly basis with eyeglass cleaner wipes - I turn it off and rub vigorously over the keys. To really get the junk off around the key edges it can take a few passes, and when done well it feels like new.

Re: Hacker News News Feed for the Mac Touch Bar

#60

Post by LeifCarrotson »

exabrial wrote: post #38
malchow wrote: post #18

The Touch Bar has revolutionized the way I accidentally invoke Siri once per 30 minute period.

3d touchpads have revolutionized the way I curse audibly a few times over the same period

3D? Like the space mouse, or like Kinect? Or are you referring to some other dimension?

I think you can disable the touch pad on most laptops and just use an external if you're just getting spurious inputs from your wrists. The Thinkpad Trackpoint is still one of the best mobile pointing devices available.

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