Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
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Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#2That actually seems pretty useful. On that row I only use escape and f12 (quake-style terminal) without the fn-button (with which I control volume and brightness). The occasional keyboard macro recording and replaying in emacs I can just as well bind to something else.
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#3The big problem I see is that my laptop is hooked up to a display half the time, lid closed. It wouldn’t be useful for showing anything that isn’t also on the main display. And it can’t have a set of bar-only controls (if Apple were serious about that use, they would have released an external keyboard with Touch Bar by now).
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#4I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article:
> As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days.
At least Siri doesn’t get in the way of productivity.
> Once again. I hate sliders on Touch Bar. Changing them to buttons was the first thing I did. Now I can tap them blindly. Guess, even my stress level significantly dropped when I stopped trying to put the sliders in the desired position. It was same to adjusting hot water in a shower — you're never gonna get it without burning yourself.
Those sliders are the worst, now requiring TWO high precision taps, while looking at the keyboard, to tweak the volume. I find myself reaching for the physical volume controls on my headset more often.
> Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every ad that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient.
Unreliable play/pause button, very annoying.
> Imagine, you want to drag a picture to a browser to upload. You click the Finder, but instead opening a new window at the same screen, it carries you away somewhere. Just because there's another Finder window opened there. And it's fucking impossible to fix that with standard MacOS tools.
Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#5I think we are going to look back on this as a dark age of human interfaces.
too much touch, not enough tactile
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#6How about abandoning the Touch Bar instead?
Apple should ditch it entirely, or at least make it optional on all MacBook Pro models.
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#7I wonder if haptics will ever be good enough that we'll have a purely touchscreen keyboard that doesn't suck.
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#8Thanks, I have been dreading the upcoming time when my pre-touchbar macbook pro is too old and I will check out these tips when it does.
One bit of feedback:
> RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural.
A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine.
The issue is that your indicator needs to show you not just "how much is used vs free", which is indeed useless. It needs to show you the breakdown of wired, active, and inactive memory. This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.
I use https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#9I always find it amusing how developers flock to MacOS saying things like "you don't need to configure it like Linux; it just works", and then there are articles like this containing myriads of workarounds for its problems :b This is cool, though. I'm somewhat envious of the shiny thing. The conky screenshots are fun, since this is quite reminiscent of it, except done somewhat usefully. It's a shame that it's tied to a little laptop keyboard that you definitely shouldn't be using full time if you value your wrists and your spine, but, it's a start.
(Now, please please please don't do all of your programming on a MacBook).
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#10I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article: > As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days. At least Siri doesn’t get in t…
You can slide on top of the volume/brightness control without the need to tap twice.