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

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#11

Post by ProfessorLayton » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

The Touchbar has been mostly a dud for me, and I don't miss it when using my older MBP. I have customized by touch bar to include my favorite actions such as locking the screen, but it is otherwise static.

My 2 biggest issues are:

- It turns off after 1 min of inactivity, and find it infuriating that I have to wake it up by before using it. Effectively making everything 2 interactions away.

- No haptic feedback. Even having the trackpad click would be useful, since it can be felt throughout the Macbook.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#12

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

bouke wrote: post #4

I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article: > As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days. At least Siri doesn’t get in t…

[deleted]

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#13

Post by reificator » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:50 PM UTC

notadoc wrote: post #6

How about abandoning the Touch Bar instead? Apple should ditch it entirely, or at least make it optional on all MacBook Pro models.

I'm sure I don't matter to Apple anymore, but the touchbar is the reason I haven't upgraded my laptop yet.

I enjoy having an Apple laptop to complement my Windows and Linux desktops, but if the touchpad doesn't go away by the time I decide not to wait any longer, I'll probably grab something else. Maybe a Chromebook with a replacement OS, maybe an Ubuntu or Fedora laptop. Probably not Windows as it's mainly for games and hobby game development for me. But whatever it is, it won't have a touchbar.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#14

Post by wiredfool » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:50 PM UTC

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 to use in the house, behind a 2012 MBA and a Thinkpad t410.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#15

Post by simonbarker87 » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:50 PM UTC

bouke wrote: post #4

I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article: > As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days. At least Siri doesn’t get in t…

You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. I find it is much quicker and more accurate to use the sliders on the touch bar as a result of this. You don’t even need to pause after the tap with your finger down, just tap and slide your finger around and the slider is there.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#16

Post by dljsjr » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:50 PM UTC

dylan-m wrote: post #9

I always find it amusing how developers flock to MacOS saying things like "you don't need to configure it like Linux; it just works", and then there are articles like this containing myriads of workarounds for its problems :b This is cool, though. I'm somewhat envious of the shiny thing. The conky screenshots are fun, since this is quite reminiscent of it, except done somewhat usefully. It's a shame that it's tied to…

The difference is that this is a highly subjective "problem".

I actually love the touch bar. I'm not in love with esc and f-keys not being physical but lots of the other stuff it does is pretty great. Like, the brightness and volume sliders he hates so much? I love them. Greatly prefer them over buttons. I've been developing on MacBooks for about 7 years now and I do almost no system configuration at all besides installing requisite apps. So yeah, I do love that developing on a Mac doesn't require me to configure it.

My takeaway is that most people probably DON'T do all that much configuring of their systems. But they aren't writing blog posts about how much they love their touch bars because there's no meat to that. It's not a useful article to write. But for people who do dislike the touch bar, this article is super useful to them.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#17

Post by GirlsCanCode » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:55 PM UTC

The developers who invented it thought that people would love it for swiping left and right on grindr all day long. They have no idea how real computer users need to use computers.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#18

Post by c22 » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

dylan-m wrote: post #9

I always find it amusing how developers flock to MacOS saying things like "you don't need to configure it like Linux; it just works", and then there are articles like this containing myriads of workarounds for its problems :b This is cool, though. I'm somewhat envious of the shiny thing. The conky screenshots are fun, since this is quite reminiscent of it, except done somewhat usefully. It's a shame that it's tied to…

It seems that every system is going to have parts that don't "work" when spread to enough people with different ideas of what works for them. Whether or not the touch bar met its goals, it seems obvious it was never added to appeal to developers. I think a lot of devs think of macbooks as machines for developers because they see a lot of their peers using them, but I suspect "developers" as a group have historically been a tiny percentage of Apple's customer base.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#19

Post by rbinv » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

ef4 wrote: post #8

Thanks, I have been dreading the upcoming time when my pre-touchbar macbook pro is too old and I will check out these tips when it does. One bit of feedback: > RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural. A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine. The issue is that your indicator needs to s…

> This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.

And how often does that actually happen anymore, really? Yes, Chrome and friends are memory hogs, but a constant RAM indicator? If a MacBook (or any other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.

Re: Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines

#20

Post by matthewmacleod » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

Counter point: I have a 2017 Pro with the Touch Bar, and it's pretty nice. I got used to the escape key in a couple of days, and I've found that it tends to keep me away from the trackpad more. Some of the UI on it is great – trimming clips in Quicktime feels lovely, and scoping searches in Dash. Some of it isn't as useful, like tab switching in Safari, but I never find that it gets in the way at all.

Honestly I'm not sure what problems people are generally having with it.