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Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

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Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#81

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

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).

The 2014 ThinkPad X1 Carbon had an e-ink touch strip instead of an F-row (exactly like the MBP does). It didn’t work very well: poor display contrast, hard to see in bright daylight, can’t feel for keys, slow response time, etc. They switched back to real keys for the 2015 model release.

...that’s why Apple’s adoption of it surprised me the most: I saw how it on the ThinkPad added no value, and while Apple has greater integration and will undoubtedly encourage third-party devs to use it - it will still be too fiddly and complicated.

I think Apple’s too proud to kill it off in just one project cycle - but I can’t see Apple’s management justifying continued investment of time into maintaining it. The fact they didn’t include it in their latest desktop keyboard (for a Pro users no-less!) says something.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#82

Post by [deleted] »

rocqua wrote: post #80
threatofrain wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#83

Post by ravitation »

Yetanfou wrote: post #77
ravitation wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

In 20 minutes I've got all the hardware drivers installed? Do they even exist/work on my machine's specific hardware? Where do I even find them? I get to choose a desktop and a distro to run? I guess I also make those choices in 20 minutes?

Did I mention this all comes without official support for a lot of commonly used software (Adobe Suite, Office Suite, etc)?

Probably not a good idea to try to make the argument that it's somehow easier to run Linux on some generic laptop than it is to run MacOS on a Mac...

Also... Being able to install software while doing other things is not a unique thing in 2018...

Also... The escape key works just fine out of the box. I can open my MacBook's box for the first time and be working in less than 20 minutes (and that's being very generous). That's simply not something you're doing with Linux.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#84

Post by glhaynes »

saagarjha wrote: post #27
rbinv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount. And how often does that actually happen anymore, really? Yes, Chrome and friends are memory hogs, but a constant RAM indicator? If a MacBook (or any other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.

> And how often does that actually happen anymore, really Pretty often, especially if you open an app that decides to allocate a lot of memory very quickly (Xcode, VirtualBox) or when you switch to an app that causes a lot of memory to be swapped in.

But if I just started up one of those apps, I'm wanting (and expecting) it to allocate a lot of memory because that's what those apps do. So I don't really see what actionable information an always-visible meter does for me. But I don’t begrudge those who like them!

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#85

Post by ASinclair »

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…

I'm glad to hear other people have issues with the enormous trackpad. The number of times I incorrectly type my password in has increased like 10x on the new MBP. Unfortunately I can't use Touch ID to login due to an employer policy.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#86

Post by ricw »

dljsjr wrote: post #16
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…

The difference is that this is a highly subjective "problem". I actually love the touch bar. I'm not in love with esc and f-keys not being physical but lots of the other stuff it does is pretty great. Like, the brightness and volume sliders he hates so much? I love them. Greatly prefer them over buttons. I've been developing on MacBooks for about 7 years now and I do almost no system configuration at all besides inst…

Same. Ever since I’ve found the “hold slidebar”+slide shortcut this has gotten even better. You press , slide left or right in one go and You’ve adjusted it better than you could have previously.

Prior to the touchbar I simply wouldn’t use the Fn buttons ever. Now I actually use them.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#87

Post by kough »

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 get bye with capslock remapped as control and using ctrl-[, which is the pinky of each hand and requires minimal movement. Control in general is useful for everything, escape not as often.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#88

Post by dylan-m »

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…

Heh, I'm mostly bitter because most of the places I've interviewed at lately just give everyone a Macbook Pro and that's the end of it, and I'm sick of cursing at their window manager and then running Linux on the things. (Missing webcam driver makes me grumpy when the XPS 13 I normally use supports everything perfectly).

Anyway, I don't mean to rag on anyone's preferred OS. More just taking an opportunity to grumble pointlessly about a particular unconvincing argument people like to use for it. (Unfortunately, that argument is convincing for the people who buy the hardware I have to put up with at work).

Also to remind people about ergonomics, because we mustn't forget these things. Please don't be too drawn to the shiny touchbar, it is still attached to a keyboard which encourages squishy hand position and which is attached to a screen that is not at eye level.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#89

Post by ken »

scarface74 wrote: post #52

Slightly off topic. But I always hated AppleScript. I first started trying to play with it in 1992 with System 7 and it always fell in the uncanny valley of being almost a natural language but not really. What’s strange is that I did like HyperTalk with Hypercard

These days you can use JavaScript for anything that has an AppleScript interface, and you can use automation (either language) from a shell script. For applications that support it, automation is pretty nice.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#90

Post by eddyg »

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.

You can make the Caps Lock key even more useful by turning it into a "Hyper" modifier (Command+Ctrl+Option+Shift) when it is held down (great for system-wide shortcuts in Hammerspoon[0], since application shortcuts that use all four modifiers are very rare) but acts like pressing "Escape" when it is tapped.

This is easily done with Karabiner Elements[1] and a simple rule[2] you import and enable.

[0] http://www.hammerspoon.org

[1] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

[2] https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/#caps_l...

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