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Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

vas3k.com

431–440 of 477 posts

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that infuriating, since you gave them your money anyway. And a lot of it. You warmly, and strongly screamed "do that again please" with a big heart shape.

You know you set the price right when people are angry at you, but they buy it anyway.

Not necessarily. Apple could offer the non-TB model for the same price and features as TB, and have more happy customers. Instead, they have people delaying purchases, desperately searching for alternatives to these infernal machines, and generally having second that's about staying with the decaying Apple ecosystem..

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I hate the touchpad on my MBP - I find I have to press the buttons too hard, even with the sensitivity up to the max. Literally gives me sore fingers.

You might consider turning on "Tap to click" in your Trackpad settings. Instead of pressing anything, you can just lightly tap a finger anywhere on the pad to send a click. There's another option for a two-fingered tap to count as a right-click.

I'm getting an annoying amount of spurious clicks even using press-to-click. I dread to think what tap would be like.

Equally annoying is when the palm rejection kicks in because I'm trying to press too close to an edge or something, and the lack of tactile feedback makes it feel like i just stubbed my finger.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might consider turning on "Tap to click" in your Trackpad settings. Instead of pressing anything, you can just lightly tap a finger anywhere on the pad to send a click. There's another option for a two-fingered tap to count as a right-click.

I'm getting an annoying amount of spurious clicks even using press-to-click. I dread to think what tap would be like. Equally annoying is when the palm rejection kicks in because I'm trying to press too close to an edge or something, and the lack of tactile feedback makes it feel like i just stubbed my finger.

I've never seen a spurious click with press to click, but I am still on a 2015 MBP.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#435
post #407
post #401

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> For many, dropping macOS would be a much larger disruption than having less usable F-keys. It's worth it, trust me. I dropped it almost twenty years ago, and I've never looked back. My computers are less expensive, more powerful & more flexible. My computing environment is customised to my needs, not those of some generic 20-something in Cupertino. If I want to, I can dig deep in the guts of my system and fix bugs…

I think that comparing the operating systems of today based on how they worked 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch. I bought my first Mac in 2009 (still kicking and alive) because I was tired of tinkering with Linux (I have abandoned Windows years before). I do look back at these systems every day at work so I do know quite well how my life would be if I really had to use them for everything. Just one example of why I…

> I think that comparing the operating systems of today based on how they worked 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch.

My family, friends & colleagues all use Apple computers & phones, so I believe that I've had pretty good exposure to them. There are a few things which macOS does better (system-wide copy/paste is clearly one), but overall I stand by what I wrote. Linux is great, and I don't thinking I'm missing anything by avoid Windows & macOS.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#436

Touch Bar had made me consider abandoning MacBooks altogether and move to Linux.

I took this exact path, and so far I'm quite happy with it. I used a touch bar MBP 13" for over a year, hated it, and came to the realization that I was no longer in the target group for these machines, or OS X, and couldn't really rely on any future updates not making things even worse.

I decided I'd rather have a larger degree of control over the machine I use for work, so I took the plunge and installed Linux on a ThinkPad. It took some tinkering, but I don't really miss anything from my Mac now. Also, I can finally run a proper tiling window manager!

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#437

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.

> Oh and BTW, if Apple discontinues the older MBP, I will NEVER buy a MBP with a Touch Bar. Aren't they already discontinued? I can't find them except (very rarely) in the refurbished store.

They are on the main page, you just have to scroll down. Its not obvious its a non-touch bar variant: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MJLQ2...

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I hate the touchpad on my MBP - I find I have to press the buttons too hard, even with the sensitivity up to the max. Literally gives me sore fingers.

You might consider turning on "Tap to click" in your Trackpad settings. Instead of pressing anything, you can just lightly tap a finger anywhere on the pad to send a click. There's another option for a two-fingered tap to count as a right-click.

I'll give that a try!

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you press Fn, the slider will go away and the "normal" function buttons will appear. So, something that used to be a simple that could be done from muscle memory is now either (a) a slider that requires change of focus or (b) a multi-key combination which is totally the same thing as the thing you miss, and in summary, everything is fine. > I really think it would do you well to learn a bit more about why your c…

> So, something that used to be a simple that could be done from muscle memory is now either (a) a slider that requires change of focus or (b) a multi-key combination which is totally the same thing as the thing you miss, and in summary, everything is fine. No. I only suggested the buttons because the author of this post thought that the slider was "bad". I don't buy their reasoning; you don't even have to look down…

> you don't even have to look down to see the slider's progress because macOS will mirror it smack-dab in the middle of your display.

Progress isn't the issue. Input is. To operate a slider, your pointer/finger needs to be where the handle is. The location of the handle is variable. The touchbar could potentially handle this smoothly by displaying sliders in such that they always appear with the handle underneath the finger, but this is not the behavior the touchbar was displaying when I tested it out -- sliders opened out to the side of the target you tap to open it, which means you then have to move your finger to the location of the handle, which requires a visual reorientation.

And none of this is an improvement on quick taps with well-defined change increments for stuff like adjusting brightness and volume. Not to mention the value of tactile feedback.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of other hardware manufacturers out there. One of the practices you might not wish to support is an OS being tied to a specific hardware vendor. If you don't like the hardware you shouldn't be buying it.

> One of the practices you might not wish to support is an OS being tied to a specific hardware vendor. Which is literally the reason why OSX is that good/stable.

I hear it's not very good/stable now, but running a Hackintosh system of Snow Leopard - Yosemite on various hardware worked pretty well. And that's without them trying to optimize it (I guess).
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