91–100 of 397 posts
The Touch Bar was what finally pushed me over the edge to remap caps lock to escape. I'm shocked at how much I enjoy ESC being close to the home row (I'm not even a big vim user). For this change alone I am glad to have the Touch Bar.
Disclaimer: I like the touchbar. I swapped escape and caps lock, installed Pock, and never looked back. This is my last MacBook. Xubuntu on a Thinkpad x1 carbon works great for everything I do, at a fraction of the price, with a keyboard the doesn't stop working with dust, and with more than just USB-C.
I am a developer. The Touch Bar is useless to me. I remapped Caps lock to Esc expecting to be annoyed, but still hit Esc nonetheless because it works. And I deftly adjust volume using the Touch Bar slider using press-and-slide (not tap then pick-and-slide), relying on the += key for tactile positioning (but the position itself is largely muscle memory by now) I am also a musician. The Touch Bar is fantastic to adjust…
> Touch Bar is useless to me. I don't get it, the rest of your comment is mostly positive?
This thread is going to dissolve into a pile-up on the Touch Bar, so I wanna jump in front of this. Readers of this site are mostly “hackers,” however mutated or dumbed-down that term has become over the years, correct? Everyone here has their windows and spaces just so, a full complement of shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and if they're serious about the Macintosh tools like TextExpander. As standard as GUIs are, w…
There is nothing "Pro" about a touch bar, even for fields outside of software. Apparently Ive's departure means Apple is not returning to function-over-form.
99%+ of my usage of the touchbar is pressing escape, adjusting screen brightness, speaker volume, or accessing music controls. All of these worked flawlessly when I had physical keys, but now it's hard to know what I'm pressing without looking, and sometimes the controls become unresponsive to touches or drags. I'm a programmer/business owner, so perhaps it's useful for other sorts of creative professionals, but it f…
I blame this mostly on Apple's human interface guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... Scroll down to "Design Considerations": "Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display." But what I really want is for the touch bar to be a display and input device for things normally elsewhere: time, date, maybe CPU usage, etc. This to me is not a hardware pr…
To me the bigger news here is killing the MacBook. It's a weird product -- crazy overpriced, and with a bunch of concessions in terms of the design, but I like that it's extremely light (33% lighter than a MacBook Air) and has no fan. I had hoped never to buy another laptop with a fan again. Yes, I know performance sucks, which is why I run most of my code on a server instead of locally on my computer. I think really…
This thread is going to dissolve into a pile-up on the Touch Bar, so I wanna jump in front of this. Readers of this site are mostly “hackers,” however mutated or dumbed-down that term has become over the years, correct? Everyone here has their windows and spaces just so, a full complement of shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and if they're serious about the Macintosh tools like TextExpander. As standard as GUIs are, w…
Then where will I map my ctrl key? Apple stupidly put the fn key in the corner and i can't map ctrl to it.
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MagSafe was nice, but I'm a big fan of being able to use an industry standard $30 charger with 60W USB-C, 3x USB-A ports, and a removable charging cable. Having to replace a whole $80 proprietary charging brick because the cable connection frayed was a pretty shitty deal.
Is it impossible to have a removable Magsafe cable?
The option we have now are magnetic breakaway USB-C nubs, but I've been hesitant to jump on that train because of stories about them breaking off in ports, short circuiting, or failing to connect properly. And especially if you have a 15" MBP with the 87W power brick, I don't think they can handle that amount of power.
Eventually I hope to see some well made versions of that from known good vendors, but even things like Griffin BreakSafe have crappy reviews right now.
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I don’t know where to start... I hope you’re never in a position to design something that people have to use.
I'm legitimately curious. Please help me understand. Again, I don't see how its worth all the hassle and surely extra cost for Apple to push it, but really don't see how it's any worse than the previous bar.
- consistent button locations across any apps. An F1 is an F1 whether you are in Finder, in Safari, or in a programming IDE.
By default Touchbar displays whatever the developers of the currently focused app put there. So switching to any app will change the touchbar rather unpredictably.
- consistent physical button locations. For any shortcut that involves physical buttons you don't have to look at your keyboard. You could change the volume easily because it was mapped to Fn + F (or just to F) that just was there.
On Touch Bar for any button that's not on the far left or on the far right edge of the touchbar, you have to look down. It becomes significantly worse as you move towards the middle of the touchbar.
- Physical buttons have affordances built-in. If you can't long-press, you can just tap on a button repeatedly. If you accidentally brush against a button or even rest your fingers on a button, it won't trigger. A physical button has tactile shape, so you can feel your way around a button to see feel you hit it correctly, or if your finger is between buttons.
Touch Bar has none of that.
Default volume and brightness controls all but require long press and slide (a huge problem for a huge number of users).
Accidental brush against Touch Bar will trigger it.
Resting a finger on the Touch Bar will trigger it.
There's no tactile feedback on the buttons.
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In general, Touch Bar is significantly worse in usability while providing very little in terms of usefulness. So bad that in just a second minor update Apple brought back the F1 layout that you can set for it in System Preferences.