I was really hoping Apple had a big leap forward in fingers-on-glass interaction planned. Imagine if the glass could kind of raise or move down so you could “feel” where the buttons were. Heck, even providing a few notches in the chassis, above the Touch Bar, for a finger to “feel” relatives where it was, and require a harder “press” to activate the Touch Bar, would have been likely a game changer.

But they didn’t. And I was always confused that the Touch Bar never got more love from the hardware developers.

That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.

It also wasn’t easy to build software for the Touch Bar from what I could gather. I had lots of ideas for little tools (think iStat-like gauges, but perhaps for things like the mic input level), but it wasn’t very easy to build one when I tried.

RIP Touch Bar. You might not be missed too much, but I bet something like you will come up again in a decade or two.

> That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.

Yes. It wasn't Jony. It came from the software side. I won't name who to protect the guilty.

    I was really hoping Apple had a big leap 
    forward in fingers-on-glass interaction 
    planned. 

Me too, but even if they solved that challenge -- I think there's an even bigger and insurmountable challenge there: a sizable percentage of users, particularly "power users", frequently use their Macbooks "docked" and hooked up to an external monitor and keyboard.

While many people happily type on their laptops all day long with no external monitor or keyboard, there are also many people (me included) who think that's an absolute ergonomic disaster and greatly value the extra screen real estate of an external monitor.

So, honestly, there's no way the Touch Bar could have been good enough for me to use it.

The whole idea was just misguided.

What Apple should have done IMO was allow an iPad or iPhone to fill that role. I still do not understand why my iPad can't be an amazing accessory to my Mac. With the right software magic and integration, it could be everything the Touch Bar was while simultaneously doing a lot more, and is of course extremely compatible with external keyboard use.

Well, I can guess why, actually -- it would require a lot of coordination between the Mac and iDevice teams and that is challenging.

(However I'm encouraged -- Sidecar is a good first step. Let's see more...)

> That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.

I think it was more like they decided to add the equivalent of an Apple Watch to Macs to support TouchID and then asked "what else can we do with it?".

If the analog add ons are DIY or even extra money, then software developers cannot rely on them being present and won't develop good software and use cases for it. At least not most of them. The best you can hope for is niche software support.

So adding stuff yourself is nice (I do it myself!) but not a way to move the industry or even the Apple ecosystem forward.

Analogue input is pretty much a solved problem. Not only do we have standards for game controllers, but also MIDI control surfaces give you a wide variety of analogue physical controls. MIDI even comes with incredibly rich input automation.

Sadly, the only company I'm aware of producing that sort of hardware for use outside the music industry seems to be Loupedeck.

And yet a developer still can’t assume that the customer will have such analog input tools available.

Niche software support? My keyboard and the analog addons works on Mac, Windows and Linux with excellent support since it runs QMK firmware.

How well does this analog input work with, say, Photoshop?

My touch bar almost always has "Display Connected: [Mirror Displays] [Extend Desktop]" on it. I can fiddle around and get it to show app-specific things, or hold Fn to see the F keys, but most of the time I'm using it it shows those useless multi-monitor buttons.

I'm sure there's some setting somewhere that defaults to showing whatever the layout for the in-focus app is, but it's failed to make me care enough about it to try to figure it out.

> It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down and doesn't lend itself to the "mechanical" use of devices that high-paced work requires.

Sure it could; it just has to beat the cost of the lookup. If you could have done some complex operation trivially with it, that couldn’t really be done with some keyboard shortcut, being a dynamic visual field would be fine.

Of course, volume sliders don’t fit that bill, and I don’t think anyone really found something that did… but it’s not some fundamental guarantee that it would be useless.

> It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down

Apart from developers many professionals do look down all the time because they typically have other devices connected e.g. synths, photo/video editing rigs.

And Touchbar was designed much more for that audience.

I can see how you might make that assumption based on how the Touchbar has exposed functionality, but this was not the goal of the Touchbar as it was sold internally. It was sold as one of the next great UI affordances. It came from some of the same people that brought us Mission Control, the Dock, Exposé, etc. I worked on a lot of these features and I never use them. Shame on me.

On a laptop, that "look down" means looking at the bottom pixels of the screen.

The looking was never the problem, IMHO, the problem was execution and utility. It was actually distracting when there was adaptive completion results continually flashing. And the rest of the buttons were never great.

If every single dialog box flashed the buttons, that would be a win as it is easier and faster to tap the touchbar than it is to navigate the cursor and then click. But this obvious use case never really materialized.

And if, like most "professional" users, the laptop is operated via an external keyboard, the muscle memory never develops.

What keyboard do you have with a trackball?

The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard has trackball options:

https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/

Oops. Should have been "trackpoint" and not trackball. It's a pimoroni trackpoint breakout board.

G80-11800 of course