I respect your opinion, but all of the examples you gave are already possible with Fn-keys.

I think what the touchbar brings is always active tutorial/reminder as to what's possible with the touchbar. Due to it's very nature you don't have to be taught what's on there, you can see, you then don't have to remember/rely on building up muscle memory.

I imagine it sucks for accessibility. I'd still want one before my faculties faulter, I imagine I'd get some use out of it with my IDE.

The touchbar is basically the 2010s equivalent of old-school function key overlays: http://www.hamstuff.com/Overlays/overlay.htm

It does also provide some useful feedback as it can display things, too.

It's also continuous.

I buy what people say that it's way better for scrubbing video/audio if you do that a lot (lots of people previously bought special-purpose accessories for the same)... and mostly worse otherwise.

Maybe not true for 2019 version but previous versions have had a serious issue with the touchbar just hanging/becoming unresponsive - requiring a reboot to fix the issue.

Most computer users aren’t hardcore users. Of course not scientific, but I know a lot of users that are intimidated by strange FN keys and are glad the touchbar clearly labels the current function of the virtual keys. We as HN crowd and hardcore freaks need to accept that no major hardware company can survive by delevoping for us niche users.

You're right, but it's not just hardware.

I was part of the spell correction team at Google, and we made sure that we aren't overly aggressive even though lots of people mistype their web query.

Nowdays I find it much harder to research rare things on Google, and I have to undo the automatic correction that the spell corrector does all the time (which is OK as long as it's easy to undo).

I've always preferred the results page corrections for spelling.

I'm more ok with the extra step, if it's my fault for misspelling.

Less so if I have to take an extra step to correct Google's inaccurate "correction."

A question for you, given your expertise: why do most (all?) spell checking/correcting not take into account key locality (is, neighboring key accidentally pressed). A big one for me is hitting n or b instead of space. I think it has gotten better recently, but has a loooong way to go. Just curious on your thoughts. Cheers!

It was there from the first iteration of spelling a long time ago (the first iteration was just looking at misspelling frequencies, second iteration 12 years ago moved to understanding multiple spelling mistakes/mistypes)

If you see these kind of easy-to-correct mistakes, it probably means that the spell corrector wasn't given that big attention in the past 10 years.

I just realized that you wrote space....that’s harder as the spell corrector works on words separately :(

I was working on URL corrections part that didn’t need to use segmentation, so I don’t know the details though.

Swiftkey does.

>Most computer users aren’t hardcore users.

I know at this point it's mostly marketing, but we are talking about a "pro" model.

Pro as in Professional End User.

While we are trading anecdotes, my extremely-non-technical girlfriend returned her Macbook in part because of the touch bar; the other part was the terrible keyboard.

In any case, it is very non-obvious that removing the function keys used by power user and non-power user alike (often for work) is necessary for the survival of the company.

It is also very non-obvious why the function keys had to be removed for a touchbar to be added to an already relatively expensive piece of hardware. The touch-bar/function keys are already non-reachable from the home row for most people; so what's another row? I think this was a design-oriented decision, not a regular-user-centric one.

Most computer users are not hardcore users, but I would think most users of a computer which costs $2400-6100 are.

https://www.boxx.com/ https://system76.com/ These companies are doing fine. There are more like them. Unless you are saying they are not major hardware companies?

Not OP, but I had never heard of them before.

Re: things that aren’t possible with Fn-keys:

Making scrubbers for audio/video (more) physical is nice, since scrubbing video with a mouse usually requires that you first move the mouse to wherever the video player puts its scrubber, and scrubbing with the keyboard usually requires multi-key combos and always has the “wrong” granularity. (It’s also helpful in that you can now combine this scrubbing in a gesture with mouse movement, e.g. picking up a clip from your library in iMovie, scrubbing through the timeline to scroll it to the right position, and then moving the mouse over to the timeline and dropping it. That’s basically an impossible gesture with mouse-movements alone; you’re left to hover the clip over the scroll-edge of the timeline and wait for it to accelerate its scrolling [and then usually overshoot].)

Come to think of it, Sublime Text and other IDEs with a minimap could display it (rotated to horizontal) on the touch-bar, and let you scrub on it, too. Do they?

When I first got a touchbar Mac I was really excited about video scrubbing, but in practice it's been useless to me. If it was a virtual scrubber wheel (like the old mouse-based Final Cut scrubbers) it would have been great, but with the current "scrollbar" type implementation, the precision is so bad that it's always been totally useless for me.

The basic VLC two-finger scroll scrubbing works way better.

One big difference is that using Fn-keys requires me to remember which key does what. They also provide no visual feedback on what state I'm currently in. For example, I may have a Fn-key that works as stop/start, but unless I already know what's going on, I don't know what impact pressing the key will have.

Since I rarely look down at the keyboard, I would have those visual notifications up on the screen anyway.

And as TouchBar is a per app custom display, you'd have to look down at your keyboard to see the current status... of anything.

The Touch Bar is only on their notebooks, "looking down" is like a half inch away from the screen you're already looking at.

...which is looking down at the keyboard.

It’s half an inch away from the bottom edge of the screen, but a considerably longer distance away from the things a person usually looks at when working.

> I may have a Fn-key that works as stop/start, but unless I already know what's going on, I don't know what impact pressing the key will have.

Someone in a related thread said the app-specific keys are only available when the app has focus, so wouldn't you have the status of the app in front of you anyway?

In any case, I found the statement funny, because touch is flakey for me, so I never know what impact pressing a touch key will have.

I find this similar to software key vs hardware keys for android phones. Hardware keys are more reliable and do not disappear of move under you, but with software keys you can add contextual options as is used to add a "change keyboard" key in the bottom right when on a textbox.

Essentially a partial fusion of the two things would be physical keys with screens on top for dynamical renaming. but that would have its own problems.

You’re right, and I wasn’t very clear with my comment which is unfortunate. I never meant to imply that any of those things were impossible with fn-keys, just that they weren’t very discoverable. The Touch Bar shows me what features are available at any given time, fn-keys don’t. Sure I could go hunting for the relevant docs, maybe I’d even learn a few key combinations along the way, but my experience tells me I won’t. Other people might, but I never much cared for the fn-keys for this very reason – I never knew quite what they did in what contexts, and didn’t care enough to find out.

So for me, the Touch Bar makes these contextual commands discoverable, and that’s worth more than the tactility of physical keys. Doesn’t matter if I can touch without looking, if I don’t know what the keys do. Besides, after a couple of years with the Touch Bar I feel like muscle memory seems to work about the same anyway, I never have to look for the mute button in Zoom for instance, I know where it is.

Thanks for challenging my comment, prompting me to (hopefully) clarify!

:-)

I do have touchbar envy! I tend not to look at my keyboard too much on desktop, but when on a laptop it's definitely in my peripheral vision and would hopefully encourage me to learn it's shortcuts. There's a lot of UX work involved to make it all work perfectly though. App's especially, shouldn't just use the touchbar, they should make it easier with visual in app reminders about what's down there. They should do this with the standard FN-keys too for us non-touchbar folk. I'm a big fan of having keyboard shortcuts shown on screen UI's.

There's no denying it can do more in than Fn-keys.

I've found the touchbar to be useful for only two things: 1) It's decent for things like volume control that need an analog slider, and 2) To give Pock a placed to live, so that there's actually some slightly above caveman task management on the Mac. There's NOTHING that the touchbar can do, though, that a real touchscreen can't do better. This entire stupid feature exists simply because Apple refuses to admit that touch screens are really useful - something you'd think they'd know after iPhones and iPads, but I heard an Apple employee making the ridiculously disproven"gorilla arm" claim as recently as last year. Apple just refuses to do what customers clearly want - the voice of Steve Jobs still controls them from the grave...

My problem with the TouchBar is that I'm using my laptop with an external screen 90% of the time so I'm never really getting used to it.

If the external keyboard had a TouchBar and I would start incorporating it into my workflow I can see it's use-fullness.

It seems like Apple associates the TouchBar more with “touching” than with keyboarding. As in, when you connect an iPad to a Mac using the Sidecar feature, the iPad will display a Touch Bar emulation, because that’s the accessory they think of a Touch Bar as belonging on: an external touch surface, not an external keyboard.

Which is honestly interesting; it seems almost like they’re suggesting that this could grow into a larger feature, where Sidecar is really a kind of “Remote Touch Bar.app”, and you could add larger Touch Bar controls to your app that are only visible through Sidecar. (So you could have OS-level support for e.g. DAWs to display their VSTs onto your iPad for direct manipulation, without needing their own iPad OS app.)

———

I should note, as an aside, that Sidecar lets you keyboard on the Mac host through an iPad’s attached keyboard-case, but doesn’t really treat finger-gestures done on the iPad screen in the Sidecar app as being equivalent to mouse touchpad gestures on the host.

I’m wondering if that’s a conscious design choice, and whether someone at Apple is thinking that the “new HCI paradigm” for desktops will involve still having an external Bluetooth trackpad, but no external Bluetooth keyboard, with that role instead being served by an iPad with a keyboard-case attached to it.

That’d kind of fit—it enables all five(!) interaction methodologies Apple currently has: mouse gestures, keyboard commands, touch inputs, pencil inputs, and touch-bar controls.

But, importantly, it does so while entirely avoiding “gorilla arm” (unlike the huge Microsoft Surface Studio), because your touch surface is small and on the table in front of you, rather than “being” the display. (For most Sidecar iPad gestures, even with a full-sized iPad Pro, you never really have to lift your arm off the table.)

In Apple’s envisioned desktop paradigm, touch is seemingly an input method that you get from a separate input device—one that happens to have a screen—rather than touch being just a “way to do” mousing.

It's ridiculous, touching imo is a vastly less efficient information exchange than typing.

Maybe now that it's called a "Magic Keyboard" they will sell it as a stand-alone product.

I usually put my laptop in front of me with an external screen above it. That way I get used to the laptop keyboard and can feel right at home in a conference room or wherever.

It's very unlikely, but I would like Apple to release the touchbar as a standalone piece of hardware (not attached to a keyboard at all). That way we could have the best of both worlds: physical function keys and a nifty touch device. Would be really useful for music/video editing

They already sell the Magic Keyboard, and I have one on my desk: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLA22LL/A/magic-keyboard-...

What is magic about it? It looks very basic.

The keys actually work.

> It turns out app makers have found some nifty uses for it, like the ability to quickly mute/unmute when in conference calls, quickly changing volume/brightness, stepping through code while debugging etc etc.

Maybe I've just had a limited, poor experience with it, but from the apps I've used these functions are only available on the touchbar when the app is focused... which has the controls anyway.

I was using Skype for Business and it had the audio controls in the touch bar, and also on the screen about 1.5" inches above the touchbar. I wanted to mute and unmute when I had the app in the background, but I couldn't. Useless.

...but you cant do that with a regular keyboard, nor phone, nor other OS. How would it know if the app is non focused which app you're commanding without taking more processing power for independent 'quick keys',and from all the new electron apps we already know how efficient they are with memory usage.

Precisely. So what does the touch bar add, if not new capability?

So now I have a touchbar that I can't do anything with that I couldn't already do before it.

Well having shortcuts to stuff that you don't want to have to trackpad up to and click every time, or remember keyboard chords for. Same purpose as function keys, but without the memorization necessary to use them.

So it's a minor ergonomic improvement, at best. Hardly anything to write home about. When it launched it was marketed as something revolutionary.

To the context it was used. Apple apps take full advantage of the touchbar. Adobe is finally doing the same. Not all pros are the same and you can turn off its override features in the system preferences. Not all revolutions are immediate.

I laughed when they showed the music professional using the touchbar to scrub through audio/video. like any pro is using anything less than a whole another macro keyboard to handle that issue

This is interesting. I don't have a touchbar model (yet) so I'm unfamiliar with the API. But it seems to me like the best way to utilize it would be to allow the user to reserve some fraction of it for global shortcuts/controls/macros, and the rest for the in focus app.

Or how about a modifier key (e.g. Cmd/Super) to make the Touch Bar display global hotkeys rather than local hotkeys? I think it already somewhat does this. But it could also display any applicable Services, which (through making Services in Automator) would cover the macro use-case.

The right-hand side of the Touch Bar is already the "control strip", which is systemwide, and it has a < at the left of the control strip that expands it to the whole Touch Bar. You can even set that to be the default if you don't like the context-specific softkeys and just want the systemwide ones.

By "other things" do you mean the things I was asked to do by the other people on the call, during the call?

Can you please clarify your comment?

Yeah... it's really contextual (of course). I work with MSSQL a lot these days and really like that Azure Data Studio has a decent sized "Run query" button in the touch bar, and I use the brightness/volume sliders all the time.

Most apps don't use it very well though - I actually quite dislike Safari's overcomplicated tab buttons - I can't make out anything so it's basically useless, and I use cmd left arrow to go back not the touchbar button.

I would love to have a hardware escape key. But despite the shitty butterfly keyboard issues I'm currently going through I want to keep this Macbook as long as possible.

> like the ability to quickly change volume/brightness

Well, these have physical buttons pre-touchbar, so the touchbar is definitely slower since it requires two clicks (one to summon the slider) and you have to look at it instead of just feeling it.

You can click on it and immediately swipe left or right, without lifting the finger. Imho it's faster.

Do you find that you can use the touchbar without having to look at it? For me I can press the volume up/volume down buttons without having to take my eyes off the screen. Plus the volume increases and decreases with a constant interval. At this point it's pure muscle memory for me to adjust volume and requires no thought. With the touchbar slider I have to physically look down and put the slider to where I want. For me pressing keys is easier than moving a slider and it's faster.

I'm the same - I tend to use the mute, volume, brightness keys instinctively without looking at the keyboard.

To be fair, I doubt most people, even developers, use the function keys enough to touch type with them.

By "touch type", do you mean "without taking your hands off the home-row" or "without looking down?"

I can't do the former, but I can absolutely do the latter. I can change the volume and brightness without looking down, and do so all the time.

Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't think I am—it's not that hard to learn by feel which keys are towards the opposite ends of the top row.

What I can't do without looking is access the middle keys, namely F4–F9. If Apple wanted to put a touch-bar there, I'd find that perfectly acceptable—I wouldn't consider it a downgrade, at least. The bar would be pretty small by that point though.

Desktop keyboards often have the function keys in groups of 4, making touch typing all of them easy.

The latter. Maybe it's not that hard to learn but I suppose I've never really felt inclined to try and touch type since hitting the wrong function key can have a higher "cost" than just typing a wrong letter. Bringing up a help dialog, going full screen, developer console, etc.

fwiw, this isn't something I've consciously "learned", just something I've discovered I can do over time.

Big difference: I can rest my finger on a fn key while looking at the screen, and not need to look down before pressing it. Not possible with the current implementation of touch screens / bars.

The biggest thing I miss about tactile keyboards (on a phone, anyway) is the no-look interaction without necessitating input. Maybe tactile navigation is the term. RIP HTC Tilt2.

On keyboards that divide them into groups of 4 (Esc, F1-4, F5-8) I absolutely do. My work laptop has that.

That's a good point. But I suppose this post is mostly about laptops and laptop keyboards don't typically have those groupings.

I can do it. Show desktop, brightness, media keys, debugging keys. My fingers know them.

I went with a 13" Air this time around. I still have physical function keys, and the fingerprint reader which I like.

Unfortunately, I'm still subject to the quality problems. I'm four months post-purchase, two weeks out of my first keyboard repair(!), and my caps lock and Q keys are already starting to go. :(

Outside of Apple world of "aesthetics over usability", Function keys are grouped spacing so you can easily find the one you need by touch. Ironically, Apple's TouchBar is less touch-friendly than a traditional keyboard.

https://www.google.com/search?q=keyboard&tbm=isch

To be fair, everyone who took computer typing should have the entire keyboard memorized. I know I can touch type a full keyboard and even use shift+keys as touch typing. You are projecting your own lack of keyboard knowledge.

I touch type everything but the function keys, including using shift, alt, and control.

I'm sure the lack of a touchbar is very annoying to people who have taken such a class but I'm skeptical that most people, or even a significant portion of developers, have taken computer typing.

Been developing for 35+ years, they didn’t teach touch typing back then so I never learned. Just some anecdata.

If you've been developing for 35+ years and you still have to look at the keyboard.... you teach yourself touch typing. Unless touch typing means something other than "not looking at the keyboard before you press the keys"?

Literally everything you've cited as a QoL improvement exist on most (if not all) laptops with physical F-keys.

Physical keys, period. People seem to not know that keyboard shortcuts have existed "forever" because they're faster than mousing about-- no need to look where you're pointing, or where to target on a touchscreen that lacks tactile feedback. They come with "muscle memory" and they don't change position based on context.

Learn keyboard shortcuts, and no one needs a touch bar.

Conversely, have a touch bar, and no one needs to learn keyboard shortcuts.

The touch bar works best for things accessed sufficiently infrequently that muscle memory won't be a thing.

If the touchbar works best for infrequently used actions then is it worth it to use so much of valuable keyboard real estate and sacrifice tactile feedback for infrequently used actions?

I think the touchbar is a cool idea and I loved that Apple explored it innovated. But I also think that ultimately it's not a good idea and good design. Particularly for the power users.

Those who use FCP, Logic X would beg to differ. It depends on use case, but not every power user is the same. Watch the video, look at their marketing, they're showing you who they think their pros are.

Are these industry pros just not talking about it? coz every review by any kind of pro i see on youtube talks about how worthless teh touch bar is as a con against a macbook

Then it has very limited value relative to its costs, one being function keys...

I live on the keyboard using vim/spacemacs, yet I almost never use the function keys. It's kinda annoying when I have to work with ncurses apps that insists on function keys (I am looking at you, htop).

Then again, I hardly ever use the touchbar either.

I tried to give this a good go. I remembered when I was the young kid thinking about all those old fogies who could not adapt to changing technologies, and now, I am the one yelling "get off the lawn!"

I never meant to imply they didn’t, but I never really used them because they weren’t very discoverable. With the Touch Bar I can tell just by looking at the “keys” what they do, whereas with fn-keys all I see is F1, F2, Fn... none of those tell me anything.

I can find out, sure, but my experience tells me I won’t, so for me the Touch bar is a win, simply from a discoverability standpoint.

My 2016 MBP has icon labels for each function you listed right on the F-key, except step debugging. Totally discoverable, just by looking, the exact same as the Touchbar. Those same icons have been in the same spot for the three other MBP's I've owned dating back to 2008.

Each to their own, but I've set mine to always and only display the brightness and volume knobs, and I still find it significantly slower to adjust those, than on my old mbp.

But in all fairness, the F-keys on a mac never really worked like function keys, they've always been more of a row of OSX-keys. I can understand why Apple felt a need to innovate that space, but I am not impressed.

No haptic feedback. I am a hunt-and-peck typist, and there is nothing more frustrating than 1) opening a web page to the user manual; 2) starting a build; 3) closing a dialog box; 4) mistakenly completing a word I am typing; all because my ring or middle finger brushed the touch bar.

It's a solution looking for a problem. It's garbage.

FWIW HapticKey adds feedback when you press touch bar keys: https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

i remap capslock to escape regardless of the make/model of laptop i use, so the lack of a physical escape key didn’t really effect me.

i never type with capslock on, and find using it for escape helps my vim workflow

That does make me wonder: why the hell is the capslock button so big? Seems like a huge waste of space.

(Edit: In case anyone else is wondering the same things, the main answers seem to be (1) on manual typewriters, both the shift and capslock needed to physically lift the entire carriage, and so required more force and was for some users a two-finger operation; and (2) all the buttons on the sides of the letters simply fill space to the edges, if we shorten the capslock, we'd need to put something else there or we'd move the A.)

I tried that too. I am getting mixed results. I have to change the way my hands and fingers move, being so used to moving the whole hand as a signal to say, "esc". I am a very tactile/kinosthetic learning, so changing the sequence my body has to move in space can really mess things up for me,

It is not working well: the very limited travel on the keys is not giving my fingers the feedback that I actually hit the "esc" key (capslock). It introduces errors.

I'd probably have to live with this laptop for a while though. I don't think the startup I work for is going to buy a new MBP for me anytime soon.

Being able to go to 32 GB will be nice though. Up until this 2019 MBP, I had seriously looked into switching back to a Linux laptop.

The 2018 MBP could be configured to 32GB. (It could not be configured to have scissor-switch keyboard of course)

Yeah, it was a bummer it took so long. I started using remote AWS instances to do all of my work because my 8 GB 2015 MBP just could not keep up ... with Slack, Zoom, Chrome, and running Rails. Let alone the VM, running a local version of Kubernetes ...

Nowadays that I am working with Elixir, multi-core is much more appreciated :-D

I started doing this because of the touchbar. Now I like this key mapping better, but I still hate the touchbar.

This is clever! Thanks for the tip

It wasn't until I got a touchbar that I realized the only function key I ever consistently used was F5 for refreshing pages. Even the few I needed in my IDE for 3-4 button hotkeys are replaced with a single button that does what I want. The touch bar is great, and I really don't understand why people cling to function keys so much

There were already keys for all those functions...

I might have to eat crow on this, but I can't imagine Apple holding out the Esc as a 16" power upgrade. It doesn't require extra motherboard or fan space.

You know, if you buy a Surface Pro or Surface Book (or most any other Windows portable), THE WHOLE SCREEN IS TOUCHABLE! The touchbar is the biggest UI/UX screwup since the one button mouse and Jobs' insistence that there be only one menubar - a decision we still suffer from today that was driven by the original Mac's laughable 9-inch 512x342 pixel screen! BTW - You people are seriously acting like an Esc key is an innovation? I'm still waiting for a real delete key... and Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, etc....

I'm interested in why you think only one menu bar is a bad thing. In my experience it makes it easy to use. On Windows, a menu bar is maybe 20-50 pixels high, and you have to hit that small target to use the menu bar. On Mac, because the menu bar is at the top of the screen, it has effectively infinite height, and I can get my mouse into it with a quick and imprecise motion, which is ideal.

I'd be curious what IDEs support the touch bar for debugging or is that something you configured yourself?

All of Jerbrains IDEs support it.

XCode does.