Based upon some other threads around here, let's hope they get the T2 chip more ironed out before putting it in anything else at this point.
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I was a TouchBar hater...
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Based upon some other threads around here, let's hope they get the T2 chip more ironed out before putting it in anything else at this point.
Yup, it definitely doesn't look like the Touch Bar is going away anytime soon, and despite what some people believe, I think an external keyboard with Touch Bar is very much in the realm of possibilities.
I've speculated before that an external Touch Bar keyboard might require a Mac with both a T2 chip and potentially Bluetooth 5.0 to work, the T2 for the Secure Enclave for Touch ID (and possibly for driving the Touch Bar display itself) and Bluetooth 5.0 for the data throughput (as I'm not sure if driving an external display of that size at 60FPS is feasible with the much slower pre-Bluetooth 5.0 speeds – though it might be with some seriously good compression). It's very possible that an external Touch Bar keyboard took some time not only because it's R&D-wise more difficult to put the Touch Bar into an external keyboard than in an internal one where battery life and real-time communication with the Mac itself aren't an issue, but also because Apple might have held off until the T2 chip and Bluetooth 5.0 are standard across all Macs, and we've reached the point where we will see both in most new Mac models going forward.
I wouldn't be surprised if either the iMac and Mac mini upgrade this fall or one of the Mac refreshes next year (for example the rumored Mac Pro release) does include a Touch Bar external keyboard after all.
I’m pretty skeptical about the desktop keyboard Touch Bar concept.
One thing people keep forgetting is how different the orientation is of where your hands are/should be on a desktop keyboard relative to the screen.
It’s an ergonomic nightmare to be looking down at your hands using a desktop keyboard just because of how far the screen is from the keyboard in a desktop context.
One thing people keep forgetting is how different the orientation is of where your hands are/should be on a desktop keyboard relative to the screen.
It’s an ergonomic nightmare to be looking down at your hands using a desktop keyboard just because of how far the screen is from the keyboard in a desktop context.
I see your point, and the larger average distance between the keyboard and the display (in case of an external keyboard setup) is also something that worries me a bit. But I suppose this is one of those things one might have to try out to get a good picture of it – maybe it will be horrible, maybe it will barely be an annoyance. And the crux of the ergonomic idea behind the Touch Bar would still stand with an external keyboard – if you have your hands on the keyboard, then all the Touch Bar elements are always in reach of your fingertips, without first having to move your hands to the trackpad and mouse, then move around the cursor on-screen to click something, etc.
If Apple is serious about replacing the function keys with something they believe to be superior, then offering it as an option on the desktop-side of their Mac lineup aswell would only be the logical consequence. And the fact that we got some patents last year for an external Touch Bar keyboard shows that Apple at least considered the idea.
I guess I’m not sure what you mean by “the ergonomic idea”…
There’s really nothing ergonomic about a touchscreen that you have to look down at and away from the primary screen to interact with.
There are some functional benefits they are going for by having a contextually changing display but it’s hardly an ergonomic choice. In the desktop versus laptop debate it is definitely the most ergonomic to have a TouchBar on a laptop though, that is for sure.
I’m still just really skeptical about it. I basically never look at my keyboard and especially so in a desktop situation and just doing it a few times over and over again to see what it would be like feels incredibly tedious with how far it is from the screen down to the keyboard
I do think we will know their plans more in a few weeks when new Mac's are announced. I'm curious too what they will do with the cheaper MacBook coming out. Seems like something they might skip to help keep the price down, but if it already will have a T2... we might see how serious they are about replacing the function keys with it.
I've also speculated elsewhere they could consider putting a Touchbar below the screen in an iMac. Would technically be easier. Downside of course is lifting your hand off the keyboard; advantage would be not having to look down from the screen. Probably a stretch though (pun intended).
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Good point, although I will say: my setup has my external monitor sitting above my laptop screen (I use both screens simultaneously). So sometimes I am glancing at the Touchbar from the laptop screen, and sometimes from the much higher desktop screen. I never thought much of the difference. I find the glancing to be rather quick once you've "learned" the particular Touchbar you are "aiming at", and never noticed a difference between the two.
Yes it actually is a feature of BetterTouchTool; in fact there are several different feedback options you can use. It should be noted that it is using the haptic engine from the trackpad, but if you use one of the stronger haptic feedback settings it will feel like it’s coming from the Touchbar.
I am actually trying the free 45-day trial of the BetterTouchTool application and it is pretty awesome. I will likely purchase it once my trial expires.
The ergonomic idea behind it is that during typing, you have the controls "right at your fingertips" (as Apple likes to describe it). If you have your fingers all on the keyboard, then it can absolutely be more ergonomic to just reach up 1cm with one finger to perform an action and continue typing or whatever you're doing, instead of having to move your entire hand down to the trackpad, then move the cursor to the respective button on-screen (which can oftentimes be hidden in the menubar or some submenu, requiring multiple clicks and cursor movements to even get there), press the button, potentially move the mouse back/out of the way and finally move your entire hand back onto the keyboard before you're able to continue.
Comparing these two is, by definition, an ergonomic question, you are comparing two arrangements of control schemes and ask which one allows to do the user something in a more efficient way which is what ergonomics are all about. It's not just about eye movement; how much you have to move your hands around, the distance and amount of different sub-paths that your cursor travels and the amount of clicks required to achieve an action is also a big part of ergonomics.
Now I'm not saying that the Touch Bar is ergonomic in every instance – by far not. If your hands are already on the trackpad for example, then it is usually faster and easier to move the cursor to the respective on-screen button than to move your hand up to the Touch Bar. The TB might not be an ergonomic winter wonderland, but that doesn't mean there aren't some applications that are just more ergonomic when performed on the Touch Bar than with whatever the alternative is. So universally claiming that there's nothing ergonomic about the Touch Bar is something I'd strongly dispute.
Now this I can get behind, and as I said that's something I'm also a bit cautious of right now. I think an external keyboard with Touch Bar is still something that can turn out useful, but I'm also curious how much the additional eye movement required on a desktop setup like that will negatively affect the experience, compared to a laptop.
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At first i was thinking this is pointless, but over the last couple of years the more i play with it in store the more i want it. Like now if i wanted to go to another web address i would have to guide my cursor to the address bar, but with the touch bar in Safari i can do it with just 1 quick press or i can put favourite sites i visit lots on the bar.
Its not perfect though , it needs a revision 2, like the esc key needs to be over fully to the left. It also makes it weird that some Mac's have this and others do not. Now i know this is very split down the middle between those who hate it and those who like it, but if Apple are going down this route it needs to be all in for it to be successful i think.
Its a bit like when Force Touch for the iPhone was introduced, the iPhone 6S had it then they released the iPhone SE after which did not, either push the new tech and go all in or don't bother.
Its not perfect though , it needs a revision 2, like the esc key needs to be over fully to the left. It also makes it weird that some Mac's have this and others do not. Now i know this is very split down the middle between those who hate it and those who like it, but if Apple are going down this route it needs to be all in for it to be successful i think.
Its a bit like when Force Touch for the iPhone was introduced, the iPhone 6S had it then they released the iPhone SE after which did not, either push the new tech and go all in or don't bother.
I'd say its no worse then doing that for the laptop as well, i.e., looking down at your hands on the laptop. Screen distance AFAIK, matters little in that sense.
I hardly ever click on address bar before or after touchbar, Cmd-L..
You don't need to use the track pad at all to use and navigate screens, apps, buttons and menus. There are shortcuts to all these actions. If you are fluent in these, the touch bar is archaic piece of tech.
So what is the shortcut to rotate an image by exactly 41.1° to the right? And then the next image to 32.51° to the left and maybe add a red 5pt-frame to it? Or to jump forward/backward in a timeline by exactly 12.5 seconds? Or to set the color of an object to rgb(31, 52, 14)? Surely you have answers to all of those and many more questions if you claim that all of that can be done without both trackpad and Touch Bar?
There are a ton of actions that not only don't have a keyboard shortcut but are not very suitable for one to begin with because they are for example much more granular and involve adjustment over a non-discrete element set to choose from.But even assuming that every action in each one of your everyday workflows can be performed with shortcuts. Even then, it's not reasonable to expect the average user to memorize the dozen of oftentimes non-standardized keyboard shortcuts that every single app he ever uses offers to him. There are tons of situations where actions do technically have a shortcut but that are so obscure and non-discoverable that a Touch Bar shortcut putting that functionality in front of your eyes can work wonders. The average user doesn't want to dig through each little submenu to learn every shortcut of each new app that he might ever use, and he doesn't want to remember each obscure three-, four- or in extreme cases five-finger-gymnastics that a developer thought would be reasonable.
Don't get me wrong – I'm an avid shortcut user myself, and there are tons of shortcuts that I can't see myself being replaced by the Touch Bar. Undo/redo, bold/italic/underlined, switch to a different view in a Finder window and so on – yeah, not gonna use the Touch Bar for that. But if I want to reformat a paragraph I just wrote to another text-style, or to an unnumbered list style, or a numbered list style with Roman numerals, or to a subsubsection in Pages, Notes or Word – yeah, I'm not gonna memorize the keyboard shortcuts for that, if there even are any. It's either on-screen controls or Touch Bar for me in that case, and if the Touch Bar offers these features and makes them accessible faster, then I'm not gonna drool over how fast I might perform that action if I knew the keyboard shortcut but just do it there.
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Really?
I don't know about you, but at my desk I have a very ergonomic setup with the screen up at mid-eye level and my keyboard all the way down above my lap, and even with some negative tilt.
The ergonomics of a good desktop setup are totally different than a laptop.
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Agreed - That's why I've always been surprised that the two machines that may have the most entry level/basic/pricing appeal (the 12" rMB and nTB 13" MBP) are the ones that do *not* have the TouchBar
Google vi versus <any other text editor>...and if you ever used vi, you would get the cheeky remark.
Sorry, nearly a month on and I only just came back to the site / thread so you've probably moved on by now, but...
Jetbrains IntelliJ Idea mostly. And that's the one where I have taken the time to set up the touch bar. But I do also have some touch bar set up in Jetbrains C-Lion as well (stuff for building and executing on a remote Vectrex console for example). I've not yet done anything with the touch bar in Xcode as I've only just recently gone back to doing anything with Xcode.
And of course there is also Visual Studio in Windows but I don't use my Mac for that, I use a Surface Pro 4.
I just started using WebStorm. Ugh such a different animal from VS Code. I love the debug tools, but man is it finicky with node.