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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

#261

Post by wiredfool »

dfee wrote: post #143
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…

Have you considered making your caps lock key an escape key? That’s been my game plan when I’m obligated to upgrade. Honestly, though I’ve held off for two years because I don’t know that I’ll be able to live with this.

No, because it’s already mapped to control. And that is Important, as its primary muscle memory. Escape shortcuts are less important. They still trip me up, but less often.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#262

Post by cup-of-tea »

dandare wrote: post #235

It forever puzzles me, how come modern keyboards don't have dedicate buttons for COPY and PASTE. Average user or pro, we use the silly combination of two keys much more often than maybe 5 other least used dedicated keys, ON TOP of the F keys.

Why is a two key combination silly? Only normal typing characters need to have a dedicated key. For everything else there are control keys. Some of those control keys I use far more frequently than copy and paste, believe it or not.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#263

Post by reificator »

cstejerean wrote: post #240
chvid wrote: post #192

I am really "worried" about two features coming out of Apple the past few years: The touch bar mentioned here and the "3D touch" feature of the iPhone 7+. These are "obviously" bad interaction designs yet they come out of a company having almost infinite resources when it comes to design. What is going on here? Is it the marketing department taking over? Is it "we have created this chip and now we have to use it some…

The fact that people that frequent HN complain about something does not make it an obviously bad idea. Most of the developer complaints about the touchbar are about losing the hardware function and escape keys (which depending on how you use your laptop can be a bad trade off). Outside of that audience (and for those that code most of the time using an external keyboard) it’s actually pretty great. I say this based b…

So if developers are not (a part of) the target audience for a "Pro" branded device, then who are?

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#264

Post by reificator »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #256
beamatronic wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having to "touch" a completely different surface to press escape sounds absolutely awful. Unless there's a way to swap escape for a real key that you don't need I would consider that machine defective.

There's a builtin toggle to map the capslock key to escape.

Not that that makes the touchbar good, but at least you can remove a useless key in favor of a useful one.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#265

Post by reificator »

gilnaa wrote: post #260
aiham wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they escape input mode?

Well, due to a bug in a specific version of vi, holding the space-bar for a few seconds causes the laptop to overheat. I bought an external thermometer that connects via USB, and I have a daemon that monitors it to notice the overheating and send the ESC key to the application.

Look. I thought it was funny too, but at least put a link so you're not just stealing the joke.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#266

Post by aequitas »

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).

This, I'm currently in the market for a new macbook and considering the tb model. I tried it in the store, it doesn't bother me as much as it should considering i'm a vim user and it does offer some nice contextual features. But I use my laptop mostly docked. So in order to benefit from the touchbar and incorporate it into my workflow I really need a external keyboard with the same feature. Otherwise I'm just adjusting my workflow all the time in relation to where I sit and I'd then rather just ignore the touchbar and stick with shortcuts.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#267

Post by chvid »

abtinf wrote: post #213
snowwrestler wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D Touch is a great way to move a cursor around in text you're writing. Just push in anywhere on the keyboard until it pops, then slide you finger to move the cursor. I use this all the time; it's much more precise than the old direct touch way to move the cursor.

I’ve always used iPhones and had no idea this feature existed. Thanks.

I don't want to digress into why 3D touch is bad design. But you are sort of pointing it out right there. Everything has to be learned. There is no natural metaphor or "affordance" that guides how it is supposed to be used. It changes from device to device, from application to application.

I am pretty sure that Apple had plenty of design people (or just people with common sense) pointing out the flaws of the touch bar and 3D touch. Yet these big expensive projects are put forward. What drives that?

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#268

Post by tigershark »

hug wrote: post #199
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please enlighten me, what's "Pro" about the touch bar?

The vast majority of working professionals have not memorised what the F-keys do in arbitrary situations. (If you don't believe this, you've never worked in as a consultant for a wide variety of companies in a wide variety of professional fields.) Not only do people not know what the F-keys do, but they have no ability to determine what an F-key might do in any given situation. Not so with the touch bar. The touch ba…

I don’t know recently but in my experience it’s absolutely false. In the ERPs or other enterprisy software they HAD to press the F-keys to do anything. If they could do it 20 years ago I simply can’t believe that suddenly humanity has devolved and it’s unable to use function keys today.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#269

Post by culturestate »

2009mobile wrote: post #220
aroman wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually used 3D touch? Because I use it just about every day, so much so that it's one of the biggest things I miss when using phones that don't have it. It also isn't touted as a major selling point anymore -- it just quietly exists, serving an extremely useful purpose as a better "right click" for touch screens. The touch bar I agree is major marketing hype.

3D touch isn't supported on the iPhone SE or on any iPads. Given that it's not supported across the iOS hardware line, it's not assigned any essential functionality. I expect that it'll play a larger role after the next major redesign of iOS in a couple years.

They've started faking 3D Touch on iPads - see e.g. the new control center, which will respond mostly the same as it does on a modern iPhone if you use a similar "force touch" action (even though you're really just holding it for n milliseconds).

I'm betting on a force-sensitive iPad sooner than later, probably the next-gen iPad Pro.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#270

Post by rickycook »

krsdcbl wrote: post #238
hmottestad wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number one thing I use it for is on the keyboard. While typing, you see a mistake you did or need to change something. Press hard on the keyboard (on the iphone) and you get a cursor you can drag around, as if the keyboard becomes a trackpad.

Android let's you touch & drag the spacebar for this - thing is, it works just fine on my cheap old phone, no pressure-touch required.

android doesn’t however do the drag selection like ios does:

hard press keyboard to get a cursor ->

drag around keyboard to place cursor ->

hard press on word to start selection ->

drag around keyboard to place end of selection

it’s a phenomenal way to select text, and everyone i know that i show it to uses it every day from them on. it’s not discoverable, but DAMN it’s handy

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