Yeah, I don't understand all the outrage over the touchbar. It changes depending on your application. So can't you setup VIM so the touchbar displays a "normal" or "classic layout", which would display all the keys that the previous model had? I am far more disappointed in the elimination of magsafe and only having USB C ports.
I'm not outraged, more like disappointed. After no significant update in a very long time we get a touch bar, but still cannot put 32GB of ram in the MB-PRO.
I am sure people could adjust to this. I am not certain how many people actually use those buttons without looking at the keyboard anyway. When I learned to type the function keys weren't included, I for one, always have to look when use a function key, and generally have to look when typing numbers too.
If you're constantly using one or two function keys, it's fairly common to do it by memory. For example I can hit the volume and brightness buttons and f5 without looking. But really, all the other functions that will become available with the touch bar will more than make up for the time lost looking down.
Maybe you could enlighten me to some of the possibilities. Besides a slider, I'm not really seeing much productivity enhancements that functions keys cannot do.
Not sure if there will be TouchBar user interface toolkit for java applications, but I spend a lot of time in IntelliJ. It would be great if the TouchBar rather than having to remember mappings, could have sets of labels [Step In, Step over...] during an active debug session or a different set during editing or presentation modes. Currently, the solution is to have myriad toolbars and icons bespeckle the window frame, which can be distracting and confusing, and all together take up some valuable laptop screen real estate.
I guess you can have virtual function keys as well as buttons for specific terminals. It depends how locked down the SDK is - knowing Apple it'll probably become more extensible as time goes on. I imagine that when IDEs can integrate with it, you'll be able to get some pretty nice features.
You can also show stuff like CI status, notifications for IMs, etc.
Why is everyone so upset about this? It is a dynamic part of the keyboard. I would be shocked if there was no option to set it "classic mode" for certain applications (or even universally if you wanted), which would have the ESC key and the function keys. Why the opposition? Having a dynamic part of a keyboard is pretty innovative, what are some of the possibilities, I am not 100% sure but I am sure that developers will find neat and useful (and probably unexpected by us and by apple) things to use it for.
Nothing you can't already do. It's just buttons with pretty graphics on them. If you want buttons to do "great productivity enhancements" the tech has been available for that on Macs for over a decade. Possibly decades plural; the Mac has had an active extension community for a long time, let alone the official stuff from Apple like AppleTalk, however flawed it may have been.
And there isn't much you can do with the pretty graphics on the buttons that you couldn't already do with pretty graphics on the screen, especially in an era of touchscreens. The whole touchbar strikes me as a demo-feature; demos great, in practice, not especially useful.
They're not just buttons. They are also sliders, pickers and any other GUI elements that you can think of.
They are visual. So you don't have to memorise any key combinations. Also they are context aware. This means you don't have to memorise all those key-context-application combinations.
It is multitouch. You cannot click at two different points on the screen with the touchpad. So this is an improvement over the current input mechanism.
Is touchbar better than touchscreens? Maybe or maybe not. Who knows now. But note that it is not placed on the screen. It is placed near the keyboard, where the other input mechanisms and your fingers normally are.
You don't need to "look down at the keyboard". In a laptop you are already looking there. It's already in your peripheral vision. And if you use an external monitor (but not an external keyboard), you simply don't have to use the touch bar.
I don't understand this negativity on HN. There will be many creative applications for this new input/output method. I'd rather see people brainstorming on all those new possibilities.