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

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#371

Post by bpicolo » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:30 PM UTC

tokenizerrr wrote: post #359

glogla wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm using my XPS13 for like a year now. > - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen Honestly haven't noticed a single thing. > - Coil whine None of that. > - Shitty battery life What's shitty? It lasts 5 hours of me working with VMs. I don't think expecting more is reasonable. It's much less laggy than my collegue's MBP, which leads me to assume that Mac just throttles the CPU down to achieve l…

> it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it

The latest generation of Macs definitely run cool, fwiw. I've never once noticed the heat

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#372

Post by sushibowl » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:33 PM UTC

nothrabannosir wrote: post #247

aiham wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they escape input mode?

C-c. Easier for some reason.

Ctrl+c is technically not quite the same as Esc: it doesn't trigger InsertLeave autocmds, and doesn't finish abbreviations. But as long as you don't have those you'll be fine.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#373

Post by whywhywhywhy » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:34 PM UTC

KillerRAK wrote: post #369

KillerRAK wrote: post #368

I refuse to buy the new MBPs for corporate use. Just keep buying the older model. The new one is an unmitigated, overreaching, disaster. Oh and BTW, if Apple discontinues the older MBP, I will NEVER buy a MBP with a Touch Bar. Utterly ridiculous. I look forward to reading about what a stupid technology blunder this was years from now in a listicle of tech mistakes.

And don't get me started about removing the glowing apple logo on the back of the screen. No reason for it -- now the back of the MBP looks just as shitty and cheap as every other craptop on the market.

Found the choice of mirror material awful, looks like the surface of a child's plastic play mirror you'd find in a dollar store.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#374

Post by bpicolo » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:34 PM UTC

aroman wrote: post #206

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…

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.

It can be useful and still be terrible interaction design - it's uses are entirely lacking in discoverability

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#375

Post by bpicolo » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:36 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #360

chvid wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

I feel like 3D Touch is very much right-clicking for phones; useful when you know it's there, but the vast majority of people don't know it's there.

Right clicking on desktop brings up a contextual menu - useful. In the case of 3D touch in apps it frequently just directly performs an action, which is worse for understanding what's happening.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#376

Post by super_mario » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:42 PM UTC

primitur wrote: post #310

p1necone wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Whats great is when seemingly intelligent apps adopt the Touchbar koolaid, such as .. iTerm. So yeah, now I'm greated with the very nice side-effect of having a massive row of blinking crud all over my vision, just because iTerm wants to show me what command is running, what keys I could use to kill the process, blink back to the shell, oh .. another app is running in the shell , better update the touchbar .. Man, it…

That's the first thing I disabled in iTerm. Also for all IDEs I just go to settings and make them display traditional function keys on the Touch Bar.

None of it can fix the horrible keyboard though.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#377

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:44 PM UTC

chvid wrote: post #267

abtinf wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

3D Touch is like keyboard shortcuts or Terminal on the Mac. You don't need them to use the platform productively, but power users may appreciate the efficiencies they enable.

A lot of people think that, if a feature or function is not immediately obvious to a new user, Apple did a bad job with that design.

But actually there is no way to build a powerful piece of technology and have it all be obvious. Trying to do that has resulted in a lot of really bad design over the years.

What product designers need to do is curate features--make the basic elements of interaction obvious, so regular folks can use the platform in the most common ways without too much thought. Then provide powerful tools for more sophisticated users--but by necessity they will be harder to discover.

Yeah, the person above didn't know about 3D Touch, but the point is that they have already been using the iPhone just fine without it! It is an enhancement, not a core function.

I'm sure there are other 3D Touch interactions that I don't know about, but that's fine. The iPhone is super powerful and it would be very hard (and probably pointless) to try to learn all the power features and little tricks.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#378

Post by barrkel » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:50 PM UTC

greglindahl wrote: post #242

sundvor wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; they've intentionally nerfed the normal keyboard models - if I was an Apple user that'd infuriate me no end. To call the range "Pro" is a lie. The biggest problem I see with it is Apple's hate of developers who touch type. Surely there's enough room on that unit to include both the function row and a touch bar? If so, it'd be pretty neat to have for presenting misc information. (It looks nice enough!) Lenovo…

I touch type, and I've never touch typed a function key.

Every time I debug, for the past 25 years.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#379

Post by ubernostrum » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 12:53 PM UTC

dithering wrote: post #339

ubernostrum wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except, again, as far as I'm aware Apple has never marketed the MacBook Pro by running around Ballmer-style and screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

They just made a good laptop, and developers used it because it was a good laptop. If anything, developers bought and used Apple's laptops in spite of shortcomings (as developer machines) which have been present for at least the twelve years that have elapsed since I first used one.

Meanwhile, I'm writing this comment on a 15" MBP with Touch Bar, and I use it as my primary dev laptop. And... well, it's still a good laptop. I would be less happy and less productive using one of the "equivalent" PC builds (regardless of whether running Windows or Linux) people always recommend. And I know that because I switched to Macs from one of those "equivalents" (a Thinkpad running Linux).

Add in that the people who are complaining about how this is the death of Apple are almost always posting while clearly indicating they've never actually used a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and I don't put this down to Apple somehow "shifting away" from "influencers". I put it down as the same kind of foaming-at-the-mouth hate that every Apple product in history has attracted, due to those products committing the unforgivable sin of being Apple products. Company seems to've survived that.

And for what it's worth, the Touch Bar took some getting used to, but now it's fine. Some apps do useful things with it. Some apps don't. About what I expected.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#380

Post by OskarS » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 1:00 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #298

I 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…

I feel like USB-C is on the rise. Nintendo Switch uses it and there's a whole bunch of new android phones starting to use come with it. I bet in a year or two, most new devices (e-book readers, phones, tablets) are going to be USB-C, probably with Apple (ironically) being the only exception. It's neat to be able to charge my Switch from my MacBook charger and vice versa (though the Switch charger barely charges the MacBook)

I don't mind so much being part of the forefront here. It's a pain to dongle, but that's the price of progress, dammit!