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I'm not sure the article author really understands how the Touch Bar works. > I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how
by eridius 10y ago
I'm not sure the article author really understands how the Touch Bar works.
> I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how it could act as a Rainmeter or MenuMeters-like at-a-glance view of my machine.
People are going to experiment with toys for the Touch Bar, sure, but nobody's going to actually try and publish a game for one. Not only would the audience be very small, but the Touch Bar itself is so limited that you're not going to be able to make a game for it that's worth buying. However, normal games can and should use the Touch Bar to extend the keyboard to do great stuff (e.g. RPGs could put Inventory, Character Sheet, Skills, etc as buttons on the Touch Bar, or use it as an alternative input for controlling some types of abilities).
As for MenuMeters-like at-a-glance, this is why I say the author doesn't seem to understand how it works, because the only way you could have an at-a-glance view in the Touch Bar is if you actually put focus on the app that provides it. You cannot have a background app that provides Touch Bar content (like you can for stuff in the menubar). The foreground app controls what's on the Touch Bar. So the only way to have at-a-glance meters on it is if the foreground app is the one providing those meters. And if you have to put focus on a particular app to see your meters, then it's not really at-a-glance after all, and it would be quicker and easier (and actually usable for people without Touch Bars) to simply have that app show the status on the screen when you give it focus.
- no_wave 10y agoThe RPG idea is something that has been tried for ages - the earliest example I can remember is the "Chocobo World" minigame on specific interactive memory cartridges for Final Fantasy VIII for the Playstation I. More recent examples include the Game Boy integration with the Wii and the default controller screen for the Wii U console. None of these attempts ended up being very successful with the exception of the wildly successful Nintendo DS, which is different in a lot of ways (in that the real estate size between the touch screen and the real screen is equal). The objection that a lot of people here have to the touch bar is that it's a sort-of-nice-to-have, never-essential feature used on very few machines, and these are the sorts of features that developers instinctively smell danger around.
- eridius 10y agoWhat you describe is not the "RPG idea" I was describing. It's literally the opposite. I was talking about using the Touch Bar the way the HIG recommends, putting buttons on it that do the same thing that you'd otherwise do with buttons on the HUD or keyboard shortcuts. I was absolutely not suggesting that you should have controls on the Touch Bar that are only accessible from the Touch Bar.
- awesomerobot 10y agoI mean, you could do all of that — Apple just won't let you.
- randyrand 10y agoOn OSX you can distribute an executable without Apple's permission. The touchbar API may or may not support all use cases, but reverse engineering the lower level interface is probably not too hard.
- awesomerobot 10y agoHopefully! I don't think anyone would be surprised if the touchbar was "App store verified" only.
- tinus_hn 10y agoOne of the main demos was for Photoshop which is not on the Mac App Store. I would be surprised.
- eridius 10y agoThat's completely backwards. Apple does not have rules stopping anyone from doing anything with the Touch Bar. The HIG is a set of guidelines, not rules (which is why it's called Human Interface Guidelines), you can violate the HIG all you want and still get in the App Store. The whole point of my last paragraph was to describe why the HIG isn't what's stopping you from doing something like MenuMeters, the way the system itself works is what's stopping you. The frontmost app gets control of the Touch Bar. If you're not the frontmost app, you can't touch it.
- Namrog84 10y agoI'm not sure how it is on Mac. But it's pretty trivial to get any exe in windows to run as a child of some tools. E.g. I wrote a personal packet manipulator for visual studio. And added a registry key. So whenever you open any Devenv.exe it launches my program with devenv as an argument. To a normal person it's 100% not noticeable. But I'm the parent and could in this example perhaps Control the touchbar. Tl Dr you can probably wrap a utility around other programs to have passive use. And/or inject tweak how controlbar looks at active window. Just force it to not update after its locked on.
- eridius 10y agoI don't think there's any way to do something like that on OS X. Nor do I think it would change anything. The Touch Bar is controlled by the app with focus, not by its parent process. Process parent chains AFAIK have zero effect on communication with the Window Server (which is presumably how the Touch Bar APIs work).