Apple says no fun allowed on the Touch Bar
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how it could act as a Rainmeter or MenuMeters-like at-a-glance view of my machine.
People are going to experiment with toys for the Touch Bar, sure, but nobody's going to actually try and publish a game for one. Not only would the audience be very small, but the Touch Bar itself is so limited that you're not going to be able to make a game for it that's worth buying. However, normal games can and should use the Touch Bar to extend the keyboard to do great stuff (e.g. RPGs could put Inventory, Character Sheet, Skills, etc as buttons on the Touch Bar, or use it as an alternative input for controlling some types of abilities).
As for MenuMeters-like at-a-glance, this is why I say the author doesn't seem to understand how it works, because the only way you could have an at-a-glance view in the Touch Bar is if you actually put focus on the app that provides it. You cannot have a background app that provides Touch Bar content (like you can for stuff in the menubar). The foreground app controls what's on the Touch Bar. So the only way to have at-a-glance meters on it is if the foreground app is the one providing those meters. And if you have to put focus on a particular app to see your meters, then it's not really at-a-glance after all, and it would be quicker and easier (and actually usable for people without Touch Bars) to simply have that app show the status on the screen when you give it focus.
None of these attempts ended up being very successful with the exception of the wildly successful Nintendo DS, which is different in a lot of ways (in that the real estate size between the touch screen and the real screen is equal).
The objection that a lot of people here have to the touch bar is that it's a sort-of-nice-to-have, never-essential feature used on very few machines, and these are the sorts of features that developers instinctively smell danger around.
E.g. I wrote a personal packet manipulator for visual studio. And added a registry key. So whenever you open any Devenv.exe it launches my program with devenv as an argument. To a normal person it's 100% not noticeable. But I'm the parent and could in this example perhaps Control the touchbar.
Tl Dr you can probably wrap a utility around other programs to have passive use. And/or inject tweak how controlbar looks at active window. Just force it to not update after its locked on.
No Mac user has ever thought "gee, this third party design is so much more tasteful than something that follows the HIG!" Apple is right to keep designers on a tight leash.
If devs all go off in their own direction, then users have to re-learn the UX for every single app.
Apple envisioned a purpose for the bar. If all apps convey a consistent message about what the bar is there for, it will become easy to use. You will know that when you intend to do a certain thing, the bar will be there to deliver this predictable functionality. What it's there for will be obvious.
If on the other hand everyone uses it for different things, then the user will receive mixed messages about what the purpose of this thing is. There's no pattern. There's no way to develop a reflex without repetition. In this case it's not repetition of a certain action but a theme. Part of using the thing is conveying a consistent intent ANY time the bar used so the user receives clear messages. It's about being a good citizen. You sacrifice freedom in how you use the bar so it becomes natural for ANYTHING you might use it for on your computer.
It's to avoid the situation of taskbar icons on windows. These have no fucking purpose.
As the Web proves every day, the problem is with designer and companies that for some reason treat the digital medium as if they were designing a goddamn paper poster - an ad that has to look pretty, instead of a tool that has to be useful.
PS You know who decided what Reader Mode should look like? Designers and typographers.
Apple stopped following the HIG a long time ago. Even Gruber admitted it back in 2011. http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/uniformity_vs_individualit...
That article, by the way, is about a good counterexample to your point (Twitter for Mac).
http://images.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/j/images/overview/touc...
Maybe wait to actually use one before trying to rally the mob with pitchforks and torches?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_key
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_keyboard
I personally don't feel the need to be that pedantic — since I've used both good touchscreen keyboards and wretched hardware, I'd prefer to focus on the quality of any specific implementation rather than philosophical debates about the nature of a “key”.
That's why I was making the distinction; I feel like you chose the interpretation of "key" that could be trivially dismissed, rather than what they probably meant in the context of their complaint.
Luckily, we've got two implementations that we can compare, and that it would be logical to assume we're talking about: The Touch Bar and the row of keys that it replaced. The TB adds some pros: continuous (slider-like) or discrete (key-like) behavior, display of dynamic information, and general flexibility. It has some cons too, though: Lack of tactile feedback makes it impossible to use without looking, it potentially requires extra key-presses (and glances to the keyboard) to use the old functionality, key placement isn't predictable, etc.
My point being: It's reasonable to assume that the comment you originally replied to was complaining about the difference between virtual and physical keys, but your reply basically said "that doesn't matter, because you can simulate the missing keys".
Beyond that, Apple can't possibly limit what the foreground app does. Distribute your tasteless animating app with a Developer ID cert, and annoy people to your heart's content.
I do want a screensaver that also uses the touch bar. Nyan Cat is acceptable in this context.
If you are legitimately worried about this then I am in horror of what software you're running on your computer.
I could understand having it require user approval but forbidding it entirely seems short sighted.
I think a lot of people in this thread are getting so riled up about bad design the only alternative they see is totalitarianism.
In this case I think if you're giving an application your focus it should be able to use a secondary screen however the user wants it to. If the experience is bad people won't use your app.
Apple is instead saying "we know what all the good experiences are, so don't go having any bright ideas" — hopefully they won't strongly enforce any of their "guidelines"
If someone can borrow me a new Mac, I'll happily work on getting nyan-mode for Emacs to display there. ;).
I don't really understand the degree of animosity that the new MBP is drawing. Apple isn't, nor have they ever really been, the makers of the ultimate dev machine. They were always just the company that makes a laptop with decent power that was actually a laptop (not a desktop with a hinge in the back) which ran a unix that was, for many, more pleasant to use than linux. That hasn't changed with this release.
Would I like them to maybe be a little less obsessive about thinness if it meant getting a keyboard with a bit more travel? Sure.
Do I think that maybe a 32GB of RAM might not be quite the battery-killing trade-off that Phil implies? Kinda. Do I expect Apple to give me the option to make that choice on my own? Not a chance.
And when it comes to the Touch Bar, I didn't really expect Apple to make this a free-for-all for developers. They've long had this tendency to want to control how developers use these new features to ensure that it doesn't get away from their vision. But will someone figure out how to hack the Touch Bar and make it do some very interesting things? Oh, absolutely.
I don't think we can call that obsession. And please note that both Asus and Samsung have keyboards with around 2mm travel - laptop standard.
I expect Apple to design for their intended customers. I also expect devs that liked the coincidentally-nice Apple hardware to complain when Apple's designs drift away from devs' requirements. I don't expect the complaints to change anything, but I expect them to be loud and all over the place for a little while.
Frankly, if an app insists on showing me ads while I'm using it, I'd rather that they be on the Touch Bar instead of the main screen.
Steam's in-game overlay feature and even some functions of the built-in Automator utility have to be allowed from there.
Typical Apple restricting the ecosystem. Guess we all knew what we were getting ourselves into.
This is one of the things that Apple has always been serious about doing right. Generally, devs who complain about this class of things are proved wrong in a few years. (Remember all of the outrage about background processes from the 2nd gen iPhone era?)
That said, even Apple is getting less Apple-y in this regard.
There's certainly a good argument that physical keys are better, due to tactile positioning and response. But there's still a virtual escape "key".
(And on a related note: Folks could make the same argument about the F13/F14/F15/Help buttons that are traditionally on a Mac keyboard. Or the lack of Print Screen/Break/Scroll Lock from Apple keyboards in general. Keyboard layouts actually do change with time. Heck, look at the "Space Cadet Keyboard" from an MIT Lisp machine to see how much things have changed.)
My solution would be allowing individual pressable physical keys to be changed via LED display, so that I can still feel them, but developers can modify what that key means. Yeah this would disable "sliding" which I don't care about.. is anyone with me on this? I hate having to look at things.
There's a whole bunch of cool keyboard products with various types of screens:
As a side note, I don't think I've ever pressed volume up/down or brightness up/down without looking at the keyboard first. I simply don't press them often enough to have muscle memory for their location, and every keyboard I use puts them in slightly different places anyway.
The same applies to music on my phone, I was able to change songs without checking on the screen where the "next" button is. I was an advocate of smartphones with hidden physical keyboards, but they didn't seem to catch up, not even with last blackberry's attempt, because they're not "cool" I guess...
Which means apps distributed outside of the app store when they have focus are allowed to put whatever they want on the TouchBar and you are allowed to close and delete the app.
Problem solved.
I want function keys there. I have a perfectly good screen to show all that other fluff on.
How did
"Let's add TouchID to the MacBook!"
become
"Let's get rid of escape, power, function keys, volume, brightness, media controls ... and replace it with a second tiny screen!"
?
Now if only they could take a look at the user-hostile default "allow" option on the dialog Safari presents when a website wants to start sending you push notifications...
I will be surprised if someone does not hack and if apple does not provide a proper API support to modify and have fun with this feature.
I'm also remain very certain that Apple is not trying to discourage people from using this thing because it only has a life span of whatever hours of active use. How I know it? Because they have been selling touchscreens for ten years now, under much stronger constraints, without any such shenanigans. And also because it is an incredibly stupid theory.