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Miss the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar? Check Out the Flexbar
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I am one of the three people who actually misses the Touch Bar. I used it quite intensively with a small handful of apps. And for these the Touch Bar turned out to be a very welcome timesaver. I would have actually loved to see Apple produce a standalone keyboard with a built-in Touch Bar. So a potential replacement sounds promising. The Flexbar may be a bit clunky, but one thing I like is that it’s slightly tilted when used with the stand, a UX improvement compared to the flat built-in Touch Bar.
But a funding goal of USD 2.5K? What is that supposed to enable? It surely doesn’t buy them any materials. Did the makers of the original Touch Bar displays donate them their remaining stock for which they had no other use? But even if that were to be the case, they will surely need an order of magnitude more money to produce a shippable product. So I’ll just wait for Feb 25 to see if the Flexbar actually materialises. Or till Feb 26 or Feb 27…
But a funding goal of USD 2.5K? What is that supposed to enable? It surely doesn’t buy them any materials. Did the makers of the original Touch Bar displays donate them their remaining stock for which they had no other use? But even if that were to be the case, they will surely need an order of magnitude more money to produce a shippable product. So I’ll just wait for Feb 25 to see if the Flexbar actually materialises. Or till Feb 26 or Feb 27…
I thoroughly understand it. I'm on a 2019 with a (surprisingly still functional) touchbar right now, and I hate it. It's hard to see what the icons are at my current angle, you can't tell what button you're touching by feel, the default behavior is infuriating, but even when I fixed by setting it to constantly have the same functions in the same place it's still annoying.
And why can't I put an eject key on it? It's not like I don't hook up an optical drive pretty often.
If it did't replace the F keys and was just added above them, I don't think there would've been as much backlash.
I didn't mind losing my Touch Bar for most things, but I have NOT gotten over losing the auto-complete suggestions when filling out forms. First name: *tap my first name in the Touch Bar* Last name: *tap my last name*
And yes, it'd be nicer if online forms "just worked" so Safari could auto-fill this stuff without any action from me, but here we are.
And yes, it'd be nicer if online forms "just worked" so Safari could auto-fill this stuff without any action from me, but here we are.
Can you see the contradiction? If very few people liked it, it wouldn't have gained that much support by applications.
Anecdotally, I can tell you that Touchbar support was the highest-voted ticket of all time in our issue tracker. So, I think, a lot of people actually enjoyed it, even though a lot of people also hated it. I think it wasn't killed for lack of fans, but because it didn't add enough value to overcome the disadvantages.
I really like the idea of this. But from what I’ve read it only does some basic stuff when connected to my iPad.
And I would need to set it up on a Mac.
The hassle would be to much for the minor gain, but if the iPad would be more supported I’d say; shut up and take my money!!!
And I would need to set it up on a Mac.
The hassle would be to much for the minor gain, but if the iPad would be more supported I’d say; shut up and take my money!!!
Definitely not something I miss.
The toolbar was once again one of Apple's experiments that turned into a pile of confusion.
* A toolbar is flat with no distinctive button feel to the touch.
* A toolbar doesn't respond to pressure - plugins had to be installed.
* A toolbar diverts attention from the screen
Overall, developers HATE the touchbar.
Another poor attempt by Apple to stand out.
The toolbar was once again one of Apple's experiments that turned into a pile of confusion.
* A toolbar is flat with no distinctive button feel to the touch.
* A toolbar doesn't respond to pressure - plugins had to be installed.
* A toolbar diverts attention from the screen
Overall, developers HATE the touchbar.
Another poor attempt by Apple to stand out.
The deleted escape key was enough for me.
I imagine many had learned a lot of shortcuts that potentially involved the function keys.
The issue was you couldn’t use function keys without looking at the damn tiny screen. And no physical feedback either.
For certain applications it was useful, of course. I wish it had not replaced the functions keys, and provided additional, dynamic input source in touch format. Best of both worlds!
I wouldn't say hate, but it doesn't work as good as the touch screen of an iPad or iPhone. The Touch Bar lacks haptic feedback and most of all: no adjustable pressure sensing. The one on my MacBook Pro (2019) is so sensitive that it reacts when my finger comes near it, not actually touching it. So often it started/stopped the Music app while I was just typing text on the keyboard. That forced me to reconfigure it to do nothing, unless I press the Fn-key.
I've always preferred physical (and thicker) keys on keyboards and the Touch Bar reconfirmed this for me. The 20 regular function-keys on any larger Mac keyboard could always be configured to do the special things.
The thing that I miss most about the Touchbar was filling out contact forms - it did make that so much easier!
Apples problem with the Touchbar was that they removed the F buttons.
If they had kept both it would have been a success.
-AE
If they had kept both it would have been a success.
-AE