Is the "Call Jony Ive" in the header picture a subtle stab at Apple? If so, well done.
Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
331–340 of 477 posts
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
And have even crappier hardware (thinkpads with screen resolution and disk sizes of last decade, not much cheaper, anyone?) with Win 10 preinstalled...
Dell XPS 13 has build quality comparable if not better than MacBooks, comes with Linux preinstalled, and has an optional high resolution QHD+ screen. http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-notebooks-and-2-in-1-...
I tried that for half a year, and it has some issues:
- Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen
- Coil whine
- Shitty battery life
- Shitty touchpad
So as whatever is Apple doing is annoying faddy bullshit, it's still the better option, especially considering the XPS 13 cost as much or more than MBP.
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand. To drag select text on android I just long press on text and drag my finger. It leaves little control points on each side to adjust to the character level (otherwise generally snaps to whole words). The first two steps seem unnecessary - why not just press on the word to start with?
Because pressing on words involves taking your finger off the keyboard, and the text is anyways often too small to be precise. You can fix it with the control bars on the sides, but it's more finicky and more interaction and requires you to move your hands.
But the description already included
> hard press on word to start selection ->
Perhaps I misunderstood though - is this hard press when the cursor is on the word.
I guess I just don't really see the problem it solves, it's just moving my thumb over the text I want rather than three distinct actions just to start the selection. Then I guess two more to change the selection and end the selection process? Whereas to select text I just long press -> move. Or for one word, long press.
Precision seems fine as I test it here, and if I want sub-word selections (rare) then adjustments seem like a reasonable approach. If the selection on iOS snaps to words anyway (second force press selects whole word?) you'd need this on both platforms.
I don't really understand how the android approach requires more interaction. Press & drag is surely less interaction than press (get cursor), drag (position cursor), press (select word), drag (move cursor), press (finish selection).
The only selections I generally want without moving "off" the keyboard is deletions, and that's accomplished just by dragging from the backspace.
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
And have even crappier hardware (thinkpads with screen resolution and disk sizes of last decade, not much cheaper, anyone?) with Win 10 preinstalled...
Dell XPS 13 has build quality comparable if not better than MacBooks, comes with Linux preinstalled, and has an optional high resolution QHD+ screen. http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-notebooks-and-2-in-1-...
Tried Dell once and didn’t like it. Dont remember exactly why. Plus the service to return the unsatisfying product was complicated.
Last time i checked there was still something missing in the xps linux system so it wasn’t an option and i decided to leave Linux as main OS after 20 years. MacOS is not better in general, mainly it just has different annoyances
e.g. less open and configurable - but therefore not changing things i got used to so fast as Ubuntu and the various graphical desktop suites (yes the superspecial tabbed window managers are more stable, but i dont like them) which seem to try new stuff i don’t need and like with every release.
I‘m based in Germany by the way, so my choice of products here might be different...
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#335Earlier 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.
Don’t you attach a keyboard and monitor for your daily work anyways? The MBP keyboard buttons aren’t too great for typing all day every day.
Which is another part of the problem in marketing an extremely expensive device for Professional users...
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
E. Don't buy Apple. You'll spend much less, and won't be supporting practices you don't approve of.
And give up the only good desktop operating system, retina screens and the only usable touchpad in laptops.
Give up the only usable trackpad if you move away.
Endure an objectively terrible keyboard with a massive failure rate if you stay.
(Ironically my £3K touchbar MBP return key failed to register a press right on cue when typing this comment)
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#337Earlier 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…
As best I am aware, many of the F-keys have no specific use outside development applications. About the only two that get used in widespread applications are F1 and F5. IDEs make good use of them for debugging, but that's about it.
Other 'Professional' software such as video editing or music production usually sticks to key combos rather than F-keys. This is traditionally why the F-key row is used for things like brightness or volume, and why Macs use these as the default function.
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#338I have the MacBook Pro 2017 edition and this is by far the worst upgrade I've experienced for such a high-end, luxury item. It's all USB-C. Virtually nobody else supports USB-C, not even Apple. Oh, you want HDMI? €100 please. I also have an iPhone 8 which is on the Lightning connector. The audio jack is gone and guess what, there's no Lightning connector on the MacBook, so you'll need 2 pairs of headsets or an adapte…
> Oh, you want HDMI? €100 please.
More like €25: https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-USB-HDMI-Adapter-Thund...
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 "Pro" in "MacBook Pro" has never meant "developers, exclusively developers, and nobody but developers". As far as I'm aware, Apple doesn't and hasn't ever explicitly targeted its higher-end models at developers. They just happen to have been good developer machines, and so developers confused that for "I am explicitly the target market of this".
Developers recommend friends and family on computer hardware purchases. We've seen it before: a company starts out (over)designing for a market segment that includes influencers, gets successful off the back of proselytization, decides to shift focus to the larger, more lucrative consumer market, and takes a big hit as the influencers move elsewhere.
Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
And have even crappier hardware (thinkpads with screen resolution and disk sizes of last decade, not much cheaper, anyone?) with Win 10 preinstalled...
Dell XPS 13 has build quality comparable if not better than MacBooks, comes with Linux preinstalled, and has an optional high resolution QHD+ screen. http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-notebooks-and-2-in-1-...
We use these XPSes and the current MBPs here. I do not recommend the QHD screens on a 13", if you ever flip Linux to text mode it is just about unreadable, and I think only MacOS handles HiDPI elegantly. Ubuntu needs a lot of tweaks to be usable.
I also agree that the trackpads are very poor, and that's still one of Apple's main strengths. Although quite why the trackpad needs to be quite so enormous on the current models is a mystery to me, so many people catch it when typing.