Nyancat on the touchbar

Even if your premise is true, is it better to move your head up and down or to move your hands forward and backward to reach the touch screen?

I believe that for the use-case of Touch Bar as slider, it has similar behavioral characteristics as a trackpad. 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 :)

As for custom keys, I think this has more in common with chording/key commands. There is the distinction that there aren't physical keys, but in the case of key commands, I know I'm not thinking, say, ⌘-Z when I undo. I'm just thinking Undo. And many key commands are application dependent. As I get used to whatever custom keys I've got programmed or are made available by an application, there'll be some period of acclimation, and then it'll just become habit. Perhaps to offset the lack of physical gaps between keys there will be larger target areas on the Touch Bar.

What do you think? Are these comparisons useful? If not, what are their limitations?

I do think the Touch Bar would benefit from some kind of haptic response, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the direction it goes.

I also wouldn't be surprised if at some time in the future there is a touch screen for Macs. That doesn't mean that Apple is ready to release such a MacBook yet (for whatever reason), or that the Touch Bar isn't a valid feature. And while it's generating a lot of heat at this point, until there are a lot more hands-on (cough) reports, I think it's prudent to remember a lot of this is speculation, both for and against.

Edit to add: If you choose to down vote, please take the time to reply with a comment as well in the interest of communication. Thanks!

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 haven't had a chance to play with the new MacBook Pro yet but it seems like a reasonable assumption.

> Even if your premise is true, is it better to move your head up and down or to move your hands forward and backward to reach the touch screen?

It's actually two different use cases here. A touch screen helps with touch type of controls. So precision zooming and scrolling is kinda awesome on one (though scrolling is weak with the nice touchpad). The touchbar is meant to be more utility like a row of function keys.

I don't think it's entirely fair to directly compare the two. For instance moving it to the bottom of the screen instead of the top of the keyboard turns it from easy to access touch keys to more informational. At least in my opinion.

Making a screen that people are supposed to touch would be an unthinkable crime.

If the space bar area was converted to the track pad. Tapping it would be a space, while dragging it would give you the touch bar like features. So for example, when using Word, you have formatting options on the space touch bar like they demonstrated on the touch bar. If you tap it, it's a space, but start sliding from the left, and the formatting options appear on the screen itself, and you stop sliding when you reach the option you want to select it. Basically, tap to touch, and slide to scrub between options (or between a timeline).

This way you also wouldn't have to take your eyes off the screen to know what options are available.