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I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article: > As a machine, MacBook Pro is great.

by bouke 9y ago

I’ve been using the 2016 MacBook TouchBar for little over a year now and feel the same pains as mentioned in the article: > As a machine, MacBook Pro is great. But not because of the Touch Bar. Touch Bar is an inflamed appendix, the same dumb shit as Siri. If Apple had implemented it as an additional row and not the F-keys replacement, everyone would forget about it in a couple of days. At least Siri doesn’t get in the way of productivity. > Once again. I hate sliders on Touch Bar. Changing them to buttons was the first thing I did. Now I can tap them blindly. Guess, even my stress level significantly dropped when I stopped trying to put the sliders in the desired position. It was same to adjusting hot water in a shower — you're never gonna get it without burning yourself. Those sliders are the worst, now requiring TWO high precision taps, while looking at the keyboard, to tweak the volume. I find myself reaching for the physical volume controls on my headset more often. > Starting from MacOS High Sierra Play/Pause button globally controls the system sounds. It is not a problem on iPhone, but on Mac it controls every ad that pop-up with more priority than Spotify. You tap the button and don't understand, why it doesn't stop the music. Thanks, Apple. Very convinient. Unreliable play/pause button, very annoying. > Imagine, you want to drag a picture to a browser to upload. You click the Finder, but instead opening a new window at the same screen, it carries you away somewhere. Just because there's another Finder window opened there. And it's fucking impossible to fix that with standard MacOS tools. Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app.

bvy 9y ago
You can slide on top of the volume/brightness control without the need to tap twice.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
simonbarker87 9y ago
You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. I find it is much quicker and more accurate to use the sliders on the touch bar as a result of this. You don’t even need to pause after the tap with your finger down, just tap and slide your finger around and the slider is there.
- Osmium 9y ago
  > You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. Yes, this is actually one of the few things I actively like about the touch bar. I love that Apple is trying something new with laptops, but sadly it's been mostly a dud for me too. I'd take Face ID + a T2 chip (like iMac Pro) any day. The fundamental problem is you don't tend to look at the keyboard when you're using a computer; there isn't enough incentive to do so, so it always feels a bit like a chore to use. I think there's a kernel of a good idea here, but the current implementation isn't it. Edit: Reading this article, I've realized all I really want from the touch bar is a permanent Dock. The Dock is important enough to always be on your screen, and it'd be really useful to have at a touch.
- bouke 9y ago
  > You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. This is a nice shortcut for adjusting the volume. However compared with non-TouchBar keyboards, adjusting the volume now requires you to look at the keyboard and precisely slide your finger around on the TouchBar. Whereas on the non-TouchBar you could rely on finger memory to instantly and without disruption from looking at the keyboard adjust the volume.
saagarjha 9y ago
Other comments have already addressed the fact that you don't have to tap twice to control your volume, but: > Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app. Uhh, it doesn't? You can put multiple apps in a space.
SllX 9y ago
> Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app. I'm thinking I might be misunderstanding this part, but here's a few tips for you: * Open Mission Control however you invoke it, top right corner there's a + button for adding a new Desktop. You can drag any windows you like into the new desktop or even force an entire app or multiple apps into that particular desktop. * Hold down the fullscreen button in the title bar of any window, you'll have the option of dragging it to the left or the right. All the windows in the current desktop will go into expose on the other side and you can select one of them to take up the other half of the display. I use this for Mail and Calendar, or two browser windows, or sometimes a text window to take notes and whatever I'm reading on the other side. Maybe I misunderstood you after all, but if I didn't, then I hope this helped.
- stillkicking 9y ago
  The fact that these features are so undiscoverable proves the point, I think. The split view management in particular is clunky as hell even when you do know how to use it, as you can't edit the view once it's been created... only tear it down. Whether it's hiding the other desktop thumbnails until you hover, or the fact that fullscreened apps always become the last space (instead of just the next one), there are loads of little things that would be trivial to fix or at least provide preferences for, hidden or not, like in the old OS X days. But new Apple seems to be infected with the same "we know better" and "everything has to work the same for everyone" authoritarian UI design that makes Android such a pain in the rear too. I miss the Apple that did things like letting you right click a document's title bar to access its parent folders, or letting you drag that icon right off the window to manipulate it. They used to understand the principle of direct representation and manipulation. Not a single new OS X feature has made it worth upgrading in recent years.
  - SllX 9y ago
    > I miss the Apple that did things like letting you right click a document's title bar to access its parent folders, or letting you drag that icon right off the window to manipulate it. They used to understand the principle of direct representation and manipulation. Not a single new OS X feature has made it worth upgrading in recent years. I actually stuck with Snow Leopard on my personal (not work) laptop for many years, and well, I did a fair amount of work on it too so obviously it was good enough, before I upgraded to Sierra when I bought a new laptop, so I completely get where you're coming from on this. That said, when we stop nitpicking every detail to death there's still a fair amount of flexibility in the OS, the window management now is light years ahead of where it was on Snow Leopard and the improvements that have accumulated over time while individually not a big deal, make for a really nice package. It was worth upgrading from Snow Leopard even though I was overall pretty happy with it. Here's another little improvement that Apple made over the years. I am also a long-time Firefox user and one of the more irritating missing features of Firefox has been the lack of Dictionary panel support. In pretty much any Cocoa app you could look up a word from Dictionary.app in any content view and it would show in a nice panel. Not so with Firefox, because while theoretically possible to support, their priorities have always been elsewhere. Mac OS X integration just isn't a high priority for them, and I can live with that. I had an add-on that filled the gap, it didn't support the panel either, but it would send the word over to Dictionary.app which was good enough. Turns out that at some point after Apple introduced multitouch trackpads they also added the ability to three-finger tap any word in any app and look it up, and it turns out that in spite of Firefox not really supporting the Dictionary panel, this will work just fine in Firefox. You just don't have it in the context menu. The Services menu will also work just fine in Firefox now, you just don't have access to it from the Context menu (which also would have replaced my add-on just fine had I noticed this sooner). There is a lot of depth and history to Mac OS X. Apple really only shows off and advertises the newest features, and there is no real user manual for anything, not one that is particularly useful. Apple could write one themselves and provide it free of charge in iBooks pushing delta updates whenever they update the operating system, but the system as a whole is much more flexible than you give it credit for and still retains those little features like being able to right click a document title and get the directory list. You can actually use a dark-themed menu bar now and create Tags in the Finder, and they haven't taken anything out like the Graphite Aqua color scheme I've always preferred. Yeah they kind of shot themselves in the foot ditching the Software Update utility in favor of App Store updates, and the Mac App Store is trash that I avoid, but on the whole I would say Mac OS X today is much more useful to me than Mac OS X 10 years ago, even as the number of unique apps I've used has dwindled down to about nine or so, three of which are cross platform and all of which are replaceable. I could honestly replace my whole operating system with any BSD, 9front or MINIX at this point without losing anything too substantial, but I would lose a lot of the small touches and refinements that have built up over the years that I'm used to and comfortable with and there's no sign of those going away.

by bouke 9y ago

bvy 9y ago

You can slide on top of the volume/brightness control without the need to tap twice.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

simonbarker87 9y ago

You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. I find it is much quicker and more accurate to use the sliders on the touch bar as a result of this. You don’t even need to pause after the tap with your finger down, just tap and slide your finger around and the slider is there.

Osmium 9y ago
> You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. Yes, this is actually one of the few things I actively like about the touch bar. I love that Apple is trying something new with laptops, but sadly it's been mostly a dud for me too. I'd take Face ID + a T2 chip (like iMac Pro) any day. The fundamental problem is you don't tend to look at the keyboard when you're using a computer; there isn't enough incentive to do so, so it always feels a bit like a chore to use. I think there's a kernel of a good idea here, but the current implementation isn't it. Edit: Reading this article, I've realized all I really want from the touch bar is a permanent Dock. The Dock is important enough to always be on your screen, and it'd be really useful to have at a touch.
bouke 9y ago
> You may already know this but you can just tap and hold on one of the brightness or volume buttons and just slide the way you want and the button morphs into a slider. This is a nice shortcut for adjusting the volume. However compared with non-TouchBar keyboards, adjusting the volume now requires you to look at the keyboard and precisely slide your finger around on the TouchBar. Whereas on the non-TouchBar you could rely on finger memory to instantly and without disruption from looking at the keyboard adjust the volume.

saagarjha 9y ago

Other comments have already addressed the fact that you don't have to tap twice to control your volume, but: > Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app. Uhh, it doesn't? You can put multiple apps in a space.

SllX 9y ago

> Not related to the TouchBar, but I don’t understand why Apple won’t improve on the Spaces feature. Why does it force me to use one space for an app. I'm thinking I might be misunderstanding this part, but here's a few tips for you: * Open Mission Control however you invoke it, top right corner there's a + button for adding a new Desktop. You can drag any windows you like into the new desktop or even force an entire app or multiple apps into that particular desktop. * Hold down the fullscreen button in the title bar of any window, you'll have the option of dragging it to the left or the right. All the windows in the current desktop will go into expose on the other side and you can select one of them to take up the other half of the display. I use this for Mail and Calendar, or two browser windows, or sometimes a text window to take notes and whatever I'm reading on the other side. Maybe I misunderstood you after all, but if I didn't, then I hope this helped.

stillkicking 9y ago
The fact that these features are so undiscoverable proves the point, I think. The split view management in particular is clunky as hell even when you do know how to use it, as you can't edit the view once it's been created... only tear it down. Whether it's hiding the other desktop thumbnails until you hover, or the fact that fullscreened apps always become the last space (instead of just the next one), there are loads of little things that would be trivial to fix or at least provide preferences for, hidden or not, like in the old OS X days. But new Apple seems to be infected with the same "we know better" and "everything has to work the same for everyone" authoritarian UI design that makes Android such a pain in the rear too. I miss the Apple that did things like letting you right click a document's title bar to access its parent folders, or letting you drag that icon right off the window to manipulate it. They used to understand the principle of direct representation and manipulation. Not a single new OS X feature has made it worth upgrading in recent years.
- SllX 9y ago
  > I miss the Apple that did things like letting you right click a document's title bar to access its parent folders, or letting you drag that icon right off the window to manipulate it. They used to understand the principle of direct representation and manipulation. Not a single new OS X feature has made it worth upgrading in recent years. I actually stuck with Snow Leopard on my personal (not work) laptop for many years, and well, I did a fair amount of work on it too so obviously it was good enough, before I upgraded to Sierra when I bought a new laptop, so I completely get where you're coming from on this. That said, when we stop nitpicking every detail to death there's still a fair amount of flexibility in the OS, the window management now is light years ahead of where it was on Snow Leopard and the improvements that have accumulated over time while individually not a big deal, make for a really nice package. It was worth upgrading from Snow Leopard even though I was overall pretty happy with it. Here's another little improvement that Apple made over the years. I am also a long-time Firefox user and one of the more irritating missing features of Firefox has been the lack of Dictionary panel support. In pretty much any Cocoa app you could look up a word from Dictionary.app in any content view and it would show in a nice panel. Not so with Firefox, because while theoretically possible to support, their priorities have always been elsewhere. Mac OS X integration just isn't a high priority for them, and I can live with that. I had an add-on that filled the gap, it didn't support the panel either, but it would send the word over to Dictionary.app which was good enough. Turns out that at some point after Apple introduced multitouch trackpads they also added the ability to three-finger tap any word in any app and look it up, and it turns out that in spite of Firefox not really supporting the Dictionary panel, this will work just fine in Firefox. You just don't have it in the context menu. The Services menu will also work just fine in Firefox now, you just don't have access to it from the Context menu (which also would have replaced my add-on just fine had I noticed this sooner). There is a lot of depth and history to Mac OS X. Apple really only shows off and advertises the newest features, and there is no real user manual for anything, not one that is particularly useful. Apple could write one themselves and provide it free of charge in iBooks pushing delta updates whenever they update the operating system, but the system as a whole is much more flexible than you give it credit for and still retains those little features like being able to right click a document title and get the directory list. You can actually use a dark-themed menu bar now and create Tags in the Finder, and they haven't taken anything out like the Graphite Aqua color scheme I've always preferred. Yeah they kind of shot themselves in the foot ditching the Software Update utility in favor of App Store updates, and the Mac App Store is trash that I avoid, but on the whole I would say Mac OS X today is much more useful to me than Mac OS X 10 years ago, even as the number of unique apps I've used has dwindled down to about nine or so, three of which are cross platform and all of which are replaceable. I could honestly replace my whole operating system with any BSD, 9front or MINIX at this point without losing anything too substantial, but I would lose a lot of the small touches and refinements that have built up over the years that I'm used to and comfortable with and there's no sign of those going away.