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Nyancat on the touchbar

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Re: Nyancat on the touchbar

#161
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you use a trackpad? Or a mouse? Do you find yourself moving your eyes back and forth between the screen and the trackpad or mouse? Honest questions. I'm not trying to be snarky :) I think the difference is that the feedback you get on the trackpad/mouse is on the screen. It doesn't need you to look down. The same thing could not probably be said of the touchbar.

Is that so? If you're scrubbing the controller on the Touch Bar, you see the result on the screen, don't you? From the demo video, when scrubbing video, there is a keyframe on the Touch Bar, but you're also seeing the change on the screen. Also, looking at my keyboard, the angle difference between looking at the function row to about 1 inch above the bottom of the screen (which I estimate to be the roughly the same a…

> If you're scrubbing the controller on the Touch Bar, you see the result on the screen, don't you?

What if you touch the wrong part of the bar and accidentally do something else? I personally have trouble believing that I'd be able to consistently touch the right part of the bar without looking every time without there being an actual physical divide between the sections even if I did consistently remember the layout and functionality for every app I used. I think peripheral vision would help here, although that goes out the window if you're hooked up to a monitor and still using the built-in keyboard.

Re: Nyancat on the touchbar

#162
post #141

So... just about the touchbar and not this particular project: The touchbar is on the keyboard, almost perpendicularly (and many times at an obtuse angle) opposite to the screen. So I have to move my head up and down all the time. This is not an issue with the regular keyboard because it has physical buttons which don't change their meaning, so I have memorized the layout and I can use my muscle memory. To avoid movi…

>and while they were at that, they could make the entire screen a touch-screen instead of just a small bar. Just imagine... a touchscreen laptop. Now that would be amazing, right? Ummm..Gravity begs to differ. Adding touch to your laptop's screen is the worse possible thing you could do to it. It just makes zero sense ergonomically: try holding your hand up to your screen for 30s and tell me how that goes.

I kind of have trouble imagining needing to use touch controls for a full thirty seconds for them to be useful. I don't even think I keep my hand on my mouse/trackpad for anywhere close to that amount of continuous time

Re: Nyancat on the touchbar

#163
post #10
post #7

I'd consider the touchbar more useful for UI interaction if it were instead in either: - The trackpad - The bottom 1" of the laptop screen

Or the spacebar!

This gives me an idea. The keyboard on my phone recently added the feature to drag along the spacebar to move the cursor in the text, but it's far too small to be that useful. I think being able to swipe on the spacebar to move the cursor or horizontally scroll would be fairly useful (especially given how often I actually scroll slightly horizontally on trackpads when I try to scroll vertically)

Re: Nyancat on the touchbar

#164

My big issue with the touch bar is it will be a far awkward reach for me when I use my desk with external monitor with a external keyboard. It's really only useful when I work outside my office. :(

Hopefully the function keys on your external keyboard will still act like they used to!

Re: Nyancat on the touchbar

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zero? Is that even possible? I don't look at my keyboard when typing so other than the slight realization that it is there on a laptop I never look at it (but yes it would technically be in my field of vision in this case but that misses the point). However on a desktop setup / docked laptop the keyboard isn't anywhere near where I could see it without significantly moving my head down. Regardless discussing field…

Again you said: "Considering zero part of my keyboard is in my field of vision I'd say yes I'd have to _move_ my head up and down." I hope you understand that you move your eyes when you look at different things on your display. The touchbar is just another display that is only slightly lower than the lowest part of your display. You don't need to move your head to see that, only your eyes. The same eyes you move whe…

> I hope you understand that you move your eyes when you look at different things on your display.

But of course. That was a huge part of my point. Moving your eyes off the display is a _big move_. It's not a typical UX pattern. These things are very well tracked in user testing with eye tracking. The idea is to incrementally move their eyes and never require large movements else you end up having UX issues.

Judging from the downvotes I'm guessing many haven't looked into or used eye tracking during user testing. It's quite interesting, you should check it out!

Re: Nyancat on the touchbar

#166
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Apple will ever do a detachable. They're problematic and have very limited use cases.

I'm unfamiliar with what detachable implies here. What's the distinction between a detachable and something like an iPad with a Smart Keyboard? Is a Surface Book or a Surface Pro a detachable?

The Surface Book which can work independently of the base. It's also been plagued with numerous problems since its release.

Re: Nyancat on the touchbar

#167
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can you feel (without looking) whether you hit just F3, or F3 and F4?

Personally, my F key usage has been so infrequent (besides F5, once upon a time) that I can't reliably touch type them. I suspect most people are the same way, especially as keyboards have miniaturized and removed the 4-clustering.

You don't even need Alt+F4 anymore since it's all CTRL+W (or CTRL+Q). or CTRL+R instead of F5. Same on the Mac.
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