However, there's more to the tiny strip of touchscreen on Apple's MacBook Pro. The BetterTouchTool utility lives in your Macs menu bar, where it can let you customize gestures for trackpad or other input devices, and even have your windows snap to specific areas of the screen too.The MacBook Pro's TouchBar can be useful within apps, providing shortcuts to extra functionality and features. The Touch Bar is contextual, so once you get it set up for each app you use, the buttons will change as you move from app to app.Drag the tool to the trash can icon on the far left of the Touch Bar. It will enter 'jiggly mode' just like on iOS. Touch and hold a tool in the Touch bar when the customization panel appears. Select Customize Touch Bar from the drop down menu. Smart displays, iOS 12.5.5 and Catalina security update, iPhone 13 problem with Apple Watch unlockingClick View in the app menu bar at the top of your Mac's screen.
At least in theory, it’s more capable and more flexible than a row of physical keys. Although there was a flurry of fascinating developer projects after launch, nothing significant ever shipped.I’m not saying the Touch Bar is useless, because that isn’t true. After some research, we agreed that there wasn’t enough there to warrant an article. I was forced to confront this unhappy fact when Adam suggested that I write an article about interesting uses of the Touch Bar. But I was mostly lured in by the Touch Bar, both for its novelty factor, and because, as a technology writer, I like to have experience with each unique Apple device to inform our articles.Alas, closing in on a year later, I’ve found that I don’t use the Touch Bar much. Practically speaking, I needed a second Mac, and a portable one at that. That wouldn’t be terrible if using the Touch Bar was faster than using other interface elements, but it’s not, because of the second problem. That makes sense because Touch Bar-equipped Macs are a small minority, but the flip side is that the Touch Bar provides no additional functionality apart from Touch ID. Per Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines, no functionality should be exclusive to the Touch Bar. But if you were to ask me today if you should spend the $300–$400 extra on a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, I would say no for two reasons: On my MacBook Pro, I have to take my eyes off the screen to find the right button on the Touch Bar, and then in the case of volume (as of macOS 10.13 High Sierra), adjust the slider accordingly.Those two factors alone make the Touch Bar largely pointless. If I need to adjust volume or pause audio playback, I just tap the appropriate key, generally without looking. On my iMac, my keyboard of choice is the Apple Wireless Keyboard. For instance, you can use the Touch Bar to switch tabs in Safari, which looks cool, but you can barely make out what’s in each tab.The upcoming macOS 10.13 High Sierra doesn’t do much for the Touch Bar. The screen is too small to be useful in some cases. Press Command-B on the keyboard, which lets you keep your hands on the keyboard and eyes on the screen.Click the Bold button in Word’s toolbar, which takes your hands off the keyboard but keeps your eyes on the screen.Tap the Bold button on the Touch Bar, which takes your eyes off the screen and your hands off the keyboard.In most cases, the Touch Bar is the slowest way to perform an action! It’s a cool-looking racing stripe that slows you down in many cases, and even worse, eliminates useful physical keys that you probably reach for reflexively, like Esc.That’s not all. On a Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pro, you have three main (there are others, but they’re even slower) ways to do this: Let’s say you want to bold some selected text. Another macro we use combines iPhone screenshots. Here at TidBITS, we have a Keyboard Maestro macro that runs a BBEdit text factory in any app to fix things like non-curly quote marks. Was it Command-Shift-Option-M or Control-Shift-Option-M?I always struggle with this, because it’s challenging to create memorable keyboard shortcuts that don’t conflict with existing shortcuts. Eliminating that restriction would go a long way toward making the Touch Bar more practical.If background apps could present Touch Bar icons, automation utilities like Keyboard Maestro could allow users to trigger custom macros from the Touch Bar without requiring a potentially obscure key combination. As far as I know, and this is backed up by Keyboard Maestro’s Peter Lewis, there’s no Apple-approved way for an app to add actions to the Touch Bar without being in the foreground. It also adds buttons to activate Night Shift and send audio and video to an AirPlay receiver (most likely an Apple TV).Should Apple abandon the Touch Bar concept? I’m not ready to go that far, but Apple needs do some work if it’s to become useful.Making the Touch Bar Useful — There are a handful of potentially useful Touch Bar applications, but they’re hampered by Apple’s restrictions. Tethering software for samsung camera wb1100f on macYou can’t configure these buttons in System Preferences > Keyboard > Customize Control Strip, and if you have more than one of these apps running, they fight over which one gets that fifth spot.Even most regular apps that support the Touch Bar now just replicate basic functionality in it, rather than allowing users to choose which commands to show there. BetterTouchTool, Mute Me, and TouchSwitcher all add a fifth button to Control Strip, but they’re ugly hacks. Being able to activate those from the Touch Bar would make the Touch Bar instantly useful for me.Some developers have figured out how to hack an extra button into the Control Strip — the handful of controls that are always visible on the right side of the Touch Bar by default. Contextual Touchbar App Software Home ButtonOf course, buying decisions are never that simple, since the Touch Bar-equipped models add a few other niceties, such as two more Thunderbolt 3 ports, faster CPU options, and faster Wi-Fi, that might make it worthwhile. Given how convincing the software Home button in the iPhone 7 is, I think this could be an effective solution.In the here and now, if you’re looking at a new MacBook Pro and can’t decide if you want the Touch Bar, I don’t think it, by itself, is worth the money. I can’t see Apple doing that, but Apple might be able to use its Taptic Engine technology to simulate gutters between buttons while still letting a slider remain smooth as you run your finger along it. The near-mythical Optimus Maximus keyboard did this by putting little OLED displays on each key. Apple should set an example here and implement some non-obvious uses of the Touch Bar in its apps.Giving the Touch Bar some level of tactile feedback would help too.
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