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...