I don't understand why anyone would prefer a volume slider to discrete up/down buttons. I almost never want to quickly slide to a specific volume, it's always "this is a little too loud" or "I didn't quite hear that."

The action I want is a quick relative tick up or down, then listen again to see if the improvement is adequate, then repeat as necessary until it's perfect.

Sliders are good for quickly moving by a large amount to a rough absolute position. But they're utter crap for fine adjustment.

Am I the only one who gets infuriated when trying to get to the exact spot I want by rolling my finger ever so slightly to get a slider to move by half a pixel? It takes forever and it gives you RSI!

>I don't understand why anyone would prefer a volume slider to discrete up/down buttons

Blows my mind how an interface I can operate with my eyes closed on touch alone would ever be considered inferior to one I actually have to engage directly with with and change modes to access sliders.

You can 'flick' the volume or brightness button on the Touch Bar to the left or right to turn down/up respectively. It even works holding down Shift+Option to enable more fine control of either.

> It even works holding down Shift+Option to enable more fine control

So now I need to use two hands and look at the control to use it when the previous worked fine one handed on touch alone.

Fine grained control (+0.1 "dots") still required two hands before I think?

Can be done one handed (opt+shift+vol) but it wasn't needed to fix inaccuracy in the default interface as the post I replied to suggested

I missed Shift+Option fine control and didn't know that. Thank you!

> they're utter crap for fine adjustment

I think if you'd make this suggestion to audio engineers they'd throw their consoles at you

Sorry, I specifically meant touch sliders, not physical sliders, and especially not physical sliders with nicely tuned damped physical resistance like on expensive audio equipment.

> I don't understand why anyone would prefer a volume slider to discrete up/down buttons. I almost never want to quickly slide to a specific volume, it's always "this is a little too loud" or "I didn't quite hear that."

Have you actually used the slider to get used to it? It requires a significant-ish slide to increase/decrease a full dot. And by significant-ish I mean it is easy to adjust it less than one dot.

That being said I used to think the same until I got used to it, I slide more than a few dots up and down all the time. I would not want to go back to taptaptaptap.

Sometimes I just want to do a slow fade to set the mood you know...

You can tap and immediately slide without lifting your finger to do that! I feel the same way and this is the closest thing the touchbar has to a killer feature.

I can just tap/hold F1 and F2 to control brightness, and same for F11/F12 for volume. Isn't it more effort to tap the correct spot on a touch screen and slide than simply press a key?

That's personal preference! I've found the sliding to be faster and more precise in my day to day usage but I wouldn't expect everyone to feel the same way.

maybe i am misunderstanding you but to change the volume, or brightness sliders, you don't need to lift your finger to adjust the slider. Once you click the volume button you can slide your finger without ever picking it up. only realized it myself after a friends told me - it never seemed that obvious

Yeah volume and brightness are just a press, hold for a split second, slide. I must be in the minority, I figured it out immediately and have used the Touch Bar quite extensively. It’s especially useful for presentations. Control spotify, volume, and switch slides back and forth all in one interface without leaving the presenter view.

Try Better Touch Tool-Golden Chaos. 3 finger slide does screen brightness, 2 finger slide does volume (you can customise them too)

https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...

A free alternative to BTT-GC if you don't have BTT is MTMR. Has the 3/2 finger slide too.

https://github.com/Toxblh/MTMR

Dang, that utility looks insanely good

I found the Golden Chaos package to offer too much and instead just spent a bit of time setting things up to my liking, and now I couldn't do without the Touch Bar!

- dock widget that shows open apps and allows me to switch quickly.

- Spotify widget that shows current track/album (with art) and controls.

- a custom date/time display that also shows the week number.

- battery level with 'time-to-full-charge' indicator.

- mute button.

But even more useful are the swipe gestures I added: two-finger swipe anywhere turns the entire bar into a volume control, and a three-finger swipe does the same for brightness.

BTT offers a ton more though.

I have a few gestures configured for the trackpad. three-finger up and down for brightness and shift + three fingers for volume if I'm too lazy to go for the touchbar. And I use a weird four-finger tapping gesture for mute and to lock my laptop ('rap' my fingers from left to right to mute, and from right to left to lock).

Then there's window sizing and, if not for Keyboard Maestro, app launching via keyboard shortcuts.

Anyways, I occasionally miss the function keys, but what the Touch Bar can do now provides enough to offset that.

Volume control taking 2 taps is a bit crazy to me, but I'll bet in testing they found that people brushed against the volume bar too much if it was always there. I accidentaly graze the "play" button often. I'd love to see if "buttons with screens on them" might work out better for me, then I could lock the top-right ones to the media controls. Maybe leave a small slider on the top-left or middle.

Honestly I've just picked up a cheap(ish) audio interface (mine is an M-Audio 192|4) and now I have a giant knob that I can use to get the perfect volume, and as a bonus, it disables the volume keys on the touchbar so I don't keep bashing them when typing.

You can just press and slide on the volume/brightness buttons without needing 2 taps.