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Has anyone here used the MBP touchbar on a daily basis? Does it improve productivity or is it just a gimmick?

j2bax 10y ago
I read on another thread a user that does a lot of podcasting/audio editing say he absolutely loves the touchbar. He can annotate in Word and pause/play/scrub his video on the touchbar without ever changing app focus. This is a somewhat niche purpose, but I could see a handful of similar applications where you need to have simultaneous control of multiple apps.
otheotheothe 10y ago
Yes i do, it greatly increased my productivity, tho i had to tweak it myself and configure it all myself basically with better touch tool, heres a good article about what you can do: https://medium.com/productivity-freak/what-if-you-could-really-customize-your-new-touch-bar-ea42ec66f42c https://medium.com/productivity-freak/what-if-you-could-real... i safe you some time and quote the BTT website on what's doable atm: A few words about the current state of the Touch Bar integration in BTT: ''' It’s quite stable now and offers many customization options. You can specify custom Touch Bars for every app or globally You can change how the Touch Bar should appear for every app (e.g. if you want to show the BTT Touch Bar only for certain apps) You can create Touch Bar button groups There are three widgets, more to come. (Currently, Battery Time, Date/Time and an App Switcher widget are available) ''' And then its up to your creativity...the touchid also improved my life, i use it for my password keeper app etc instead of my masterpw... The thing is, you have to ignore all the usual anti touchbar hate and find out for yourselv how YOU could use it, then make a decision if it's worth it for you.
jclardy 10y ago
I have one as my main machine. I use the touchbar about as much as I used the function keys...so almost never. Well that isn't entirely true as I use it for volume all the time which I do like better than just having a key. Also TouchID and 1Password together are amazing since I have a fairly long master password. I think it really depends on what you do though, as I have used it in final cut and that seems nice for swiping around your timeline. Anything with a slider control works well, anything with buttons isn't that great as you actually have to look at the thing to see if a button exists in the first place. I don't think it is necessarily a hardware problem, but right now the software just isn't there. I think Apple should rethink the "default" state a bit to give it some more utility.
ohstopitu 10y ago
A friend of mine has a maxed out MBP and while he claims it's not a gimmick, he does not use it often. It's useful at times (especially as they have bigger buttons for stuff like debugging etc.) But all in all....if he had a choice, he'd get a regular one.
kalid 10y ago
I was skeptical at first but now really like it. * Can quickly ("analog-y") adjust brightness and volume. Similar to a volume dial in a car vs. up/down volume buttons. In 2 seconds you can dial it in. * YouTube videos (in Safari) have the playback controls in the touchbar, not in the interface. You can watch a fullscreen video and scrub through / jump around while keeping your real estate * TouchID is really nice with 1Password * I can see things like Pomodoro timers, etc. being useful in the touchbar. I haven't looked at extensions yet. * Things like the print dialog have a big, colorful button. It immediately stands out and highlights the most common action from where you are in the program. "I don't need to hunt around to adjust margins, paper handing, I just want to print." * The escape key has a larger hit target than is shown so you can still use vim effectively. Overall, for developer tools, I'm willing to invest in even marginal gains if it makes my life better. We use these machines hours every day, for years.
ser0 10y ago
I have the touchbar on my work laptop. As a developer I would say that it is a gimmick. I leave it on control strip mode rather than mix of app controls with control strip so that the keys do not change as I change applications. Applications in *nix and by JetBrains still utilise function keys for shortcuts. If default touch-bar preferences allowed for showing function keys at all times with control strip triggered on fn, that would be my preferred default mode.
- r00fus 10y ago
  You could probably do it yourself using BTT: https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/02/hands-on-custom-touch-bar-button-bettertouchtool-video/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/02/hands-on-custom-touch-bar-but...
freehunter 10y ago
I don't own one, but I've seen them in stores and I honestly cannot understand the hate for the touchbar. When I ask people about it they end up saying something like "they took away the Esc key" but every model I saw in the Apple store had an Esc key prominently displayed on the touchbar. Every single one of them. I imagine it ships stock like that. So they switched it to a touch sensitive key instead of a physical key, but it's still there, right? It's still in exactly the same location. I honestly don't understand the outrage.
izacus 10y ago
I've been using a 15" tMBP and the TouchBar has been a huge step back in usabilitiy for me. Mostly due to: 1.) It's utterly buggy. There are times when it doesn't boot after laptop comes back from sleep. Sometimes buttons don't redraw (e.g. missing ESC until you tap on that empty space). Sometimes it even hangs leaving you without brightness and volume controls. It's incredible how Apple managed to release something this buggy and how it passed QA. 2.) It gives no touch feedback at all, making pressing anything blindly on it feel terrible and inaccurate. Since each supporting app defines their own button position, it means that the buttons keep moving around making muscle memory pretty much impossible. 3.) Most of the time it's empty - pretty much none of the non-Apple software supports it. Volume control and brightness controls are now hidden behind a slider that's hard to hit blindly (as opposed to previous function keys). 4.) For most cases when it DOES work, it's still easier and quicker to press a keyboard shortcut because you can reliably press it without looking down at your fingers. 5.) It's pretty bright and sometimes distracting in the evening. This is a minor issue, but it's not synchronized with the keyboard brightness control and you can't darken it manually when working in dark environments or watching movies. 6.) TouchID is the only part I really like - it's made the OS experience way better. If I could rip it out and replace it with proper ESC/Fx keys, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The part that most marketing materials don't show is this: the touchbar will only show shortcuts of the currently focused app (besides a few pre-set ones like volume, siri, show desktop). If the focused app doesn't support it, it'll sit there empty. It would be significantly better if it would at least show shortcuts to dock applications, let you fully customize it with macros and shortcuts or let you control a certain app in the background while using another app. But you can't (yet I'm aware BTT exists, but even that hides macros behind another tap and slow animation). All in all I can't fanthom how anyone at Apple thought this would be a productivity win for their most expensive 4000EUR laptops. I'd expect it to be useful for less techy people who don't use or know shortcuts... but for their high-end pro machines it's just a huge step back in usability.

j2bax 10y ago

I read on another thread a user that does a lot of podcasting/audio editing say he absolutely loves the touchbar. He can annotate in Word and pause/play/scrub his video on the touchbar without ever changing app focus. This is a somewhat niche purpose, but I could see a handful of similar applications where you need to have simultaneous control of multiple apps.

otheotheothe 10y ago

Yes i do, it greatly increased my productivity, tho i had to tweak it myself and configure it all myself basically with better touch tool, heres a good article about what you can do: https://medium.com/productivity-freak/what-if-you-could-really-customize-your-new-touch-bar-ea42ec66f42c https://medium.com/productivity-freak/what-if-you-could-real... i safe you some time and quote the BTT website on what's doable atm: A few words about the current state of the Touch Bar integration in BTT: ''' It’s quite stable now and offers many customization options. You can specify custom Touch Bars for every app or globally You can change how the Touch Bar should appear for every app (e.g. if you want to show the BTT Touch Bar only for certain apps) You can create Touch Bar button groups There are three widgets, more to come. (Currently, Battery Time, Date/Time and an App Switcher widget are available) ''' And then its up to your creativity...the touchid also improved my life, i use it for my password keeper app etc instead of my masterpw... The thing is, you have to ignore all the usual anti touchbar hate and find out for yourselv how YOU could use it, then make a decision if it's worth it for you.

jclardy 10y ago

I have one as my main machine. I use the touchbar about as much as I used the function keys...so almost never. Well that isn't entirely true as I use it for volume all the time which I do like better than just having a key. Also TouchID and 1Password together are amazing since I have a fairly long master password. I think it really depends on what you do though, as I have used it in final cut and that seems nice for swiping around your timeline. Anything with a slider control works well, anything with buttons isn't that great as you actually have to look at the thing to see if a button exists in the first place. I don't think it is necessarily a hardware problem, but right now the software just isn't there. I think Apple should rethink the "default" state a bit to give it some more utility.

ohstopitu 10y ago

A friend of mine has a maxed out MBP and while he claims it's not a gimmick, he does not use it often. It's useful at times (especially as they have bigger buttons for stuff like debugging etc.) But all in all....if he had a choice, he'd get a regular one.

kalid 10y ago

I was skeptical at first but now really like it. * Can quickly ("analog-y") adjust brightness and volume. Similar to a volume dial in a car vs. up/down volume buttons. In 2 seconds you can dial it in. * YouTube videos (in Safari) have the playback controls in the touchbar, not in the interface. You can watch a fullscreen video and scrub through / jump around while keeping your real estate * TouchID is really nice with 1Password * I can see things like Pomodoro timers, etc. being useful in the touchbar. I haven't looked at extensions yet. * Things like the print dialog have a big, colorful button. It immediately stands out and highlights the most common action from where you are in the program. "I don't need to hunt around to adjust margins, paper handing, I just want to print." * The escape key has a larger hit target than is shown so you can still use vim effectively. Overall, for developer tools, I'm willing to invest in even marginal gains if it makes my life better. We use these machines hours every day, for years.

ser0 10y ago

I have the touchbar on my work laptop. As a developer I would say that it is a gimmick. I leave it on control strip mode rather than mix of app controls with control strip so that the keys do not change as I change applications. Applications in *nix and by JetBrains still utilise function keys for shortcuts. If default touch-bar preferences allowed for showing function keys at all times with control strip triggered on fn, that would be my preferred default mode.

r00fus 10y ago
You could probably do it yourself using BTT: https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/02/hands-on-custom-touch-bar-button-bettertouchtool-video/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/02/hands-on-custom-touch-bar-but...

freehunter 10y ago

I don't own one, but I've seen them in stores and I honestly cannot understand the hate for the touchbar. When I ask people about it they end up saying something like "they took away the Esc key" but every model I saw in the Apple store had an Esc key prominently displayed on the touchbar. Every single one of them. I imagine it ships stock like that. So they switched it to a touch sensitive key instead of a physical key, but it's still there, right? It's still in exactly the same location. I honestly don't understand the outrage.

izacus 10y ago

I've been using a 15" tMBP and the TouchBar has been a huge step back in usabilitiy for me. Mostly due to: 1.) It's utterly buggy. There are times when it doesn't boot after laptop comes back from sleep. Sometimes buttons don't redraw (e.g. missing ESC until you tap on that empty space). Sometimes it even hangs leaving you without brightness and volume controls. It's incredible how Apple managed to release something this buggy and how it passed QA. 2.) It gives no touch feedback at all, making pressing anything blindly on it feel terrible and inaccurate. Since each supporting app defines their own button position, it means that the buttons keep moving around making muscle memory pretty much impossible. 3.) Most of the time it's empty - pretty much none of the non-Apple software supports it. Volume control and brightness controls are now hidden behind a slider that's hard to hit blindly (as opposed to previous function keys). 4.) For most cases when it DOES work, it's still easier and quicker to press a keyboard shortcut because you can reliably press it without looking down at your fingers. 5.) It's pretty bright and sometimes distracting in the evening. This is a minor issue, but it's not synchronized with the keyboard brightness control and you can't darken it manually when working in dark environments or watching movies. 6.) TouchID is the only part I really like - it's made the OS experience way better. If I could rip it out and replace it with proper ESC/Fx keys, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The part that most marketing materials don't show is this: the touchbar will only show shortcuts of the currently focused app (besides a few pre-set ones like volume, siri, show desktop). If the focused app doesn't support it, it'll sit there empty. It would be significantly better if it would at least show shortcuts to dock applications, let you fully customize it with macros and shortcuts or let you control a certain app in the background while using another app. But you can't (yet I'm aware BTT exists, but even that hides macros behind another tap and slow animation). All in all I can't fanthom how anyone at Apple thought this would be a productivity win for their most expensive 4000EUR laptops. I'd expect it to be useful for less techy people who don't use or know shortcuts... but for their high-end pro machines it's just a huge step back in usability.