[hanief]

Apple's HIG[1] on the Touch bar is actually great. You can sort of understand the reason Apple put it on the Macbook. You can at least envision two interesting things:

- Touch UI for scrubbing/scrolling contents faster.

- Dynamic shortcuts for most used commands that previously only accessible by using the keyboard.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...

[monkmartinez]

You mean like the ginormous trackpad directly beneath the keyboard? Wouldn't it be cool if they built scrubbing/scrolling right into that?

Also, dynamic shortcuts! Like the kind you get with BetterTouchTool[1]?

[1]https://www.boastr.net/

[72deluxe]

I thought this whilst watching Apple's event. All of the functionality they demonstrated on the TouchBar basically duplicated functionality already in each app via a shortcut. Eg. safari - you can open a new tab! (cmd-T). There's an address bar! (cmd-L). You can go to each tab! (cmd-number, eg. cmd-1).

And all of the gestures were what the excellent touchpad was built to do anyway. Scrubbing? Gestures will do that.

It's like they put two giant touch interfaces on the device so that they could fight for attention, and the poor developer has to write two handlers for the two event sources, whilst it does the same thing at the end of it.

[hanief]

I haven't actually tried it yet, but by watching the launch demo and several screenshots of touch bar on app like Photos or Final Cut Pro I can see that:

- Touch Bar is probably better on scrubbing/scrolling because you can actually see the zoomed out content, like the entire timeline of the movie on FCP.

- I haven't tried Boastr. I am sure it's useful and faster for pro. But on first look it's pretty complicated. It's not built in to the Mac and not easily accessible, especially for new user.

[monkmartinez]

So scrubbing on a tiny screen where your finger occludes the items you need to see? Otherwise, the trackpad or screen itself would make more sense....

[grzm]

I think there's something to what you're saying here. That's often been an argument for the mouse/pointer vs touch screen as well. How is this different from using a touch screen in general? Or are you saying that's problematic as well? Having an additional Touch Bar to effectively increase screen real estate by removing the necessity of dedicating screen space to the slider control seems like a win.

I don't do video editing or anything like that. My experience with a slider is pretty much limited to Netflix and such on my tablet :) Seems to work pretty well there. I can see how it might not work as well for fine-grained work. But that's an argument for touch screens in general, isn't it? Or do you think there's a distinction between Touch Bar and touch screen?

Caveat: On some video sliders, you can move vertically as well to increase/dilate the resolution of the horizontal movement. You won't have the same room with the touch screen. A couple options I can think of: use the track pad or a key press to modify the Touch Bar tracking; or perhaps track the speed of movement on the Touch Bar to modify the resolution, e.g., slower movement, higher resolution.

[hanief]

No, sir. In fact you can still see both the current content on the Macbook screen and the entire timeline on the Touch Bar. On trackpad, you need to actually move the pointer to the content before you can scrub, and it's not really that fast. If you manipulate directly on the screen, isn't it will block the view?

IMHO, as far as I understand it, Touch Bar is a bridge that connects the static nature of the keyboard with the dynamic nature of the screen. It is not intended to replace keyboard nor the screen. It is there to augment and extend them.

Touch bar is perfect for this job, considering:

- You can't beat the fast input from fixed keyboard + muscle memory.

- Touch screen on a laptop is really not ergonomic, your arm will get tired fast.

[nicky0]

You have a lot of strong opinions about something you have never used.

[avree]

I always enjoy installing and configuring complicated 3rd party software! This BetterTouchTool is way better than any out of the box "it just works" software...

[krew_tahn]

No. Ye gods no.

O' how I despise the new trackpads that aren't merely trackpad pointing devices, but also buttons, scrollbars and other bullshit I never wanted too.

Christ. I need to move the fucking mouse cursor. And, shit on me, I did not intend on fucking clicking or swiping anything, or an other absurdly tangential but obliquely imaginable bullshit, God damn it.

The worst is when you have to press the trackpad to click the button, and as your fleshy fingers flatten out against the trackpad, it registers the pressure center moving slightly, and so the pointer moves, and you click the wrong God damned thing because the trackpad IS the button.

It was better when the buttons were separate plastic divisions disconnected from the motion tracking area.

JUST MOVE THE CURSOR PLEASE.

[wtallis]

Have you tried Apple's recent trackpads with the Force Touch sensor and haptic feedback?

In my experience, the fact that the trackpad no longer physically moves when you press down on it to click makes really cuts down on the problem of the cursor moving during the click, as does the greatly improved uniformity of the force required. Being able to adjust the force required to click is also quite nice.

I was never quite satisfied with Apple's hinged trackpads (or the standalone bluetooth trackpad with the click mechanism in the rubber feet) as a replacement for the physical button despite the trackpad size increase it enabled, but the latest generation strikes me as almost perfect.

[frik]

The public out cry is because Apple removed the ESC key for no reason (and positioned it one row above on the touch bar). And many are angry that MacBookPro now costs even more, and has 2013-style hardware in 2016. If it was called MacBookAir and cost half there would be no out cry. A Pro-level notebook that is now way too thin for high-end hardware and too thin for common connectors and too slow for high end application needs like 4k video cutting & processing, etc. - well it's not a Pro-notebook anymore, more something for wannabes, life-style and hipsters article. As the other hardware desktop/mini/Pro/notebook stuff from Apple is stuck in 2013-models as well, it's scary to watch how they don't get it at all. So the touch bar isn't a problem, it's just one of many questionable decisions (the same happens at Microsoft, so many questionable decisions and deaf ear to the community) - Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are really missing.