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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

#471

Post by roboyoshi »

ValentineC wrote: post #430
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.

> 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.

No thank god they still offer it - I just got one for my new workplace.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#472

Post by ValentineC »

cloverich wrote: post #437
ValentineC wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Ah ok, it seems like the option's only available for the 15-inch model though. I'm sadly not used to that form factor.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#473

Post by YetAnotherNick »

dismal2 wrote: post #466
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean holding the touch for a second and then manually moving the markers?

Yes. And on a similar topic, I find the loupe effect a lot more intuitive than the android bottom of cursor handle too

Better than android, likely, but I seriously can't edit a word file due to this. A mouse/trackpad is so much better than ios.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#474

Post by addicted »

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…

The touchbar still fails even for folks who don’t memorize function keys.

If you are not memorizing the keys, then you will need to look down at the touchbar to figure out where to tap to do what you want to do.

If you need to be looking anyways, why is it better to look at the top of the keyboard, instead of the screen where your eyes are normally located?

Replicating a touchbar style strip on the screen is a much better option than anything on the touchbar.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#475

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

Izkata wrote: post #102
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> hard to see in bright daylight Huh? One of the defining features of e-ink is that it's easier to read in bright light, compared to a regular screen...

It had a smooth plastic window over it without any matte-finish or anti-reflective coating. Couple that with how the keyboard area is often in the shade made it hard to see.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#476

Post by gargravarr »

lloeki wrote: post #391
gargravarr wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> if you ever flip Linux to text mode it is just about unreadable setfont sun12x22 [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts#Console_fonts

I just tried this on an Ubuntu machine and sun12x22 doesn't exist. After some poking around and reading the linked wiki page, I found that Lat2-VGA32x16 (case-sensitive) produced a readable display. Given that running `setfont` on its own errors with `Cannot find default font`, I wonder if the default Ubuntu install neglects some things.
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