Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

vas3k.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 477 posts

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#71

Post by avhon1 »

dawnerd wrote: post #25
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #11

The Touchbar has been mostly a dud for me, and I don't miss it when using my older MBP. I have customized by touch bar to include my favorite actions such as locking the screen, but it is otherwise static. My 2 biggest issues are: - It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions away. - No haptic feedback. Even…

Primary reason it turns off is because its oled, and leaving it on would cause burn-in.

Sounds like a great application for an e-ink display. No burn-in, low power, and can always emit as much light as the keys on the keyboard do (by front-illuminating the bar when the keyboard backlight is on).

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#72

Post by delecti »

SN76477 wrote: post #5

I think we are going to look back on this as a dark age of human interfaces. too much touch, not enough tactile

I definitely disagree. I think we're at a great balancing point with touchscreen laptops, the keyboards aren't perfect but they get the job done, and the touchscreen augments that wonderfully. Phones are inherently limited by size, and while I miss physical keyboards, the flexibility of on-screen keyboards more than makes up for it.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#74

Post by Terribledactyl »

r00fus wrote: post #28
wiredfool wrote: post #14

I’ve been living with a touchbar machine for about two months now, and the only useful thing about it for me is the touchid spot. Escape, slow as hell. Brushing the touchbar and bringing up the man app on some random argument, useless and annoying. It’s gotten a lot better now that I’ve switched it from context to function keys, and am using an external keyboard 95% of the time. It’s really my third favorite laptop t…

I can live with all of the half-baked features of the latest MBPs (I have one for work, my home one is much older) but the false recognition of the overly large touchpad drives me crazy. It's bad enough that I have to disable tap-to-click (which I greatly preferred - much more elegant) and it still mis-clicks if I rest my hands on it. I used to think the MBP trackpads were a cut above everything else - now they're to…

> It's bad enough that I have to disable tap-to-click

The crazy thing is that the "full" click is entirely simulated. I don't use MBPs anymore but the only place I had to turn off that feature was there as well.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#76

Post by dawnerd »

simcop2387 wrote: post #47
dawnerd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know they sell a version without touchbar right?

Only in the smaller lower performance bracket models. They do not make a 15 inch macbook pro without a touchbar. EDIT: In fact I didn't realize that it's significantly different spec wise to the 13 inch with touch bar. Only going to a 2.5Ghz base clock speed on the non-touch bar. And this is with only intel integrated graphics and a dual core cpu only, compared to the 15 inch models. This can be a big deal for anyone…

Huh, I just assumed it was the same specs just without touchbar. That blows.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#77

Post by Yetanfou »

ravitation wrote: post #41
dylan-m wrote: post #9

I 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…

I find comments like these amusing. First, you don't need to spend hours configuring the Touch Bar for it to be a functional machine, like you would trying to run Linux on a laptop... But some people do, because it's there. The Touch Bar works just fine without this article. Second, having a myriad of workarounds for its problems is a positive not a negative. Everything has problems; I'll take the platform that has a…

Just like you don't need to spend hours trying to run Linux on a laptop. I'd say 20 minutes is enough in general, depending on how you install it. Quicker when using a fast network connection, slower when you first have to get a distribution.

But wait, this is not all you get, there is more. You can choose which desktop you want to run, you can install application software at the same moment, you can either start working or start tinkering, whatever fills your need or desire.

One thing you generally do not have to do: start tinkering around to get a working Escape key. OK, I said generally, those who bought a computer without one may have no other choice than to join the article writer in his quest for sanity.

Did I mention all this comes for free?

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#78

Post by KillerRabbitt »

avhon1 wrote: post #71
dawnerd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primary reason it turns off is because its oled, and leaving it on would cause burn-in.

Sounds like a great application for an e-ink display. No burn-in, low power, and can always emit as much light as the keys on the keyboard do (by front-illuminating the bar when the keyboard backlight is on).

Do eink displays have decent pixel density yet? The last time I used an eink was in 2012 and looked terrible by modern standards

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#79

Post by mitchellgoffpc »

huebnerob wrote: post #58

I started remapping the Caps Lock key to the Escape command when I got my tbMBP, and now it's the very first thing I do on every single computer I start using, touch bar or not. MacOS even now offers this as a 1st party option in system preferences, it works phenomenally. I even love, at a visceral level, the balanced symmetry of ESC and ENTER being opposite each other.

Same, but I always remap Caps Lock to Control since I use the emacs keybindings. Using other people's laptops is really disorienting now, but worth it :)

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#80

Post by rocqua »

threatofrain wrote: post #65
huebnerob wrote: post #58

I started remapping the Caps Lock key to the Escape command when I got my tbMBP, and now it's the very first thing I do on every single computer I start using, touch bar or not. MacOS even now offers this as a 1st party option in system preferences, it works phenomenally. I even love, at a visceral level, the balanced symmetry of ESC and ENTER being opposite each other.

If you're a Vimmer this is invaluable. ctrl-c and esc feel terrible after that.

I'm hesitant to do this for portability reasons, but it really would be a great method. Instead, I have some stuff in my .vimrc, which is a lot easier to port over than a key-remap.
Post reply on HN