Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines • Hacker News Board

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#111

Post by _fzslm » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:43 AM UTC

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…

> No haptic feedback

HapticKey fixed this for me: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#112

Post by dwighttk » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:44 AM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #97

ricw wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Before the Touch Bar, you could always use modifier keys in combination with volume keys for continuous (rather than discrete) volume adjustments. Except it was on the screen, with a huge volume display, using volume keys you could feel with your fingers, taking up less keyboard space overall.

shift + option +volume up / down for those who are curious

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#113

Post by egypturnash » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:47 AM UTC

This article makes me really glad I custom-configured the most powerful Macbook Pro possible that didn't have the Touch Bar.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#114

Post by exabrial » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:52 AM UTC

The only thing genuinely useful on the touchbar is the fingerprint reader, after you enable the PAM module. Well technically the reader isn't part of the touchbar, so I guess that doesn't count now that I think about it.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#115

Post by prepend » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:55 AM UTC

I’ll install this plugin and pay $5 just to avoid tapping the dot durn brightness buttons by accident or instead of escape. Happens many times every day. Even though I’m trying not to. Can’t remove it from the touch bar.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#116

Post by losvedir » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 1:06 AM UTC

The default touch bar was pretty useless to me, mostly because the buttons keep moving around on every app and I never remember what it can do. But a few tweaks and it's useful again:

In System Preferences > Touchbar I manually added all the applications I normally use into the "always show Fn keys" mode, so now the touchbar basically always shows Esc and the Fn keys.

Then, add Apptivate to tie each Fn key to my most used apps (F1 = Finder, F2 = Slack, F3 = Chrome, F4 = Sublime, etc), and I can easily switch among my most used applications. It's not quite touch-typeable like with hardware fn keys, but close enough.

I briefly looked around for a utility but didn't find one, but basically my goal is this: a static touch bar that never changes, which switches to or launches a set of specified apps. Is that possible?

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#117

Post by paxys » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

rwz wrote: post #106

The biggest problem with touchbar is that Apple intentionally made non-touchbar model inferior in terms of hardware and the amount of USB-C ports to make sure ppl buy touchbar. This is truly infuriating and I'm sure, was done for purely marketing reasons. I'd buy a non-touchbar model if it had the same hardware as a touchbar model in a heartbeat.

I get what you're saying, but that doesn't seem like a problem with touchbar, rather the advantage of it..

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#118

Post by paxys » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 1:23 AM UTC

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…

And even touch ID would have been a lot better to use if it was on one of the bottom-row buttons (e.g. cmd or option) instead.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#119

Post by arthurofbabylon » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 1:24 AM UTC

I’m a non-tech savvy person who happens to work in tech. I find the touch bar very useful.

This is what I believe: the touchbar is for people like me... people who never learned to use the F keys, people who aren’t obsessive about shortcuts but appreciate them when discovered. In short, it’s for the 90% of software users that float between general public and pro users. It works.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#120

Post by usaphp » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 1:28 AM UTC

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #119

I’m a non-tech savvy person who happens to work in tech. I find the touch bar very useful. This is what I believe: the touchbar is for people like me... people who never learned to use the F keys, people who aren’t obsessive about shortcuts but appreciate them when discovered. In short, it’s for the 90% of software users that float between general public and pro users. It works.

> In short, it’s for the 90% of software users that float between general public and pro users. It works.

Then they should have not called it a “MacBook pro” there is nothing “pro” about touch bar, it’s something useless that I have to pay extra for and I don’t need it at all.