Thursday, April 5, 2018

Making the Touch Bar Useful by Abandoning Apple Guidelines

Vasily Zubarev (via Hacker News):

The Touch Bar should always be predictable. I don’t want to remember button configuration for every app. I want it to be useful and informative. Just give me an additional screen, like in the early fan renders.

[…]

The grown-up me started to track my everyday habits and search Reddit for ideas. The only proper app for Touch Bar customization I’ve found, is BetterTouchTool. It’s still buggy, user-hostile and drains the battery, but it only costs $5. Reasonable price, I recommend it.

[…]

Standard Touch Bar will never support the most useful feature — to display the name of track playing. Instead, Apple provides you with huge and useless timeline slider. I don’t know what’s playing but know the moment in time.

[…]

A lot of cool guys wanted to share their presets too, so we created a GitHub-repo for that. Feel free to add your own: github.com/vas3k/btt-touchbar-presets[…]

Previously: Making Better Use of the Touch Bar.

Update (2018-04-09): hrbrmstr:

Combining @boastr_net’s BetterTouchTool & @holman’s spark to add auto-updating sparklines to the macOS Touch Bar

1 Comment RSS · Twitter


I have never heard anyone tell me they particularly enjoy the Touch Bar functionality. I wonder if any outcry would happen if Apple flat out removed the Touch Bar?

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