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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

#121

Post by p1necone »

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…

"It turns off after 1 min of inactivity" Oh wow I didn't know that, I've been kinda leaning on the "it might actually be pretty cool/useful" side of this touchbar thing, but now I'm squarely in the "it's totally useless" camp. What were they thinking?

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#122

Post by d3sandoval »

makecheck wrote: post #3

The 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).

If you have an iPad, you can use duet to simulate the touchbar on the bottom of the display. This makes it all the more useful if you're using your iPad to see chat messages or monitor the status of a terminal since it also takes advantage of the touchscreen

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#124

Post by stonogo »

mikenew wrote: post #108
eddyg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.hamm…

Do you happen to know how to do that on a linux machine running X? I'm afraid to dive back into the xkb rule hell-hole to figure it out myself.

setxkbmap -option 'caps:ctrl_modifier'

handles part of it and

xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape'

does the rest. xcape is in the ubuntu repos, for fedora there's a copr (dawid/xcape).

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#125

Post by rileyphone »

mikenew wrote: post #108
eddyg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.hamm…

Do you happen to know how to do that on a linux machine running X? I'm afraid to dive back into the xkb rule hell-hole to figure it out myself.

Try xcape

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#126

Post by jchw »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #81
avhon1 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 greate…

I owned one of those X1 Carbons and that was absolutely not e-ink. It was merely some LED lights over a touch surface. All the possible configurations were physically cut out; you couldn't display arbitrary stuff on it. Even for what it did do, it sucked, and made the entire layout more awkward.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#127

Post by beamatronic »

usaphp wrote: post #120
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.

The only time I touch my Touch Bar is to hit the Escape key.

Because I use vi.

Because I am a professional and theoretically the target audience of $3,000 premium quality laptops.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#128

Post by nugi »

saagarjha wrote: post #36
nerfhammer wrote: post #7

I wonder if haptics will ever be good enough that we'll have a purely touchscreen keyboard that doesn't suck.

> a purely touchscreen keyboard that doesn't suck Many people would consider an iPhone keyboard to be this…

You can pry my model m from my cold dead fingers. Haptics is no substitute for actual physical feedback.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#129

Post by merb »

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.

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

I know a LOT of people who are not tech savvy and still could write without looking at their keyboard. (p.s. there were devices who had a keyboard before computers even existed and people learned to use them without looking every second at the typewriter/keyboard)

So basically the touch bar basically removes that flow completly

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#130

Post by merb »

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.

15" has no "new" hardware. the 15" non-touchbar model is the old one, without usb-c and old processor.
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