{"id":34225,"date":"2021-11-22T16:35:44","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T21:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=34225"},"modified":"2021-11-22T16:35:44","modified_gmt":"2021-11-22T21:35:44","slug":"the-reincarnation-of-the-touch-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/22\/the-reincarnation-of-the-touch-bar\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reincarnation of the Touch Bar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Luc P. Beaudoin<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The obvious advantage was providing configurable, direct access to context sensitive commands.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

To reduce the need to look down towards the physical keyboard, macOS could present a virtual command bar on the main screen. This would be triggered by some event, such as a physical key, keyboard shortcut, Siri, hand gesture, eye gesture, or facial gesture (see next section). This virtual keyboard could be presented as a single row of buttons, or a 2-D array of buttons.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As someone who really hated the actual Touch Bar, I do think there’s something to the idea of providing similar functionality in other ways. (Ideally it would be much more<\/em> configurable than the Touch Bar was.) I’m thinking something like the old System 7 Control Strip, but with an area for application-specific functionality, too. To a certain extent, this idea lives on in menu bar status items. But the menu bar fills up easily, and the old Control Strip could be resized, hidden, and shown, including via keyboard shortcut. In Big Sur, Apple freed up some menu bar space by consolidating popular status items into a single Control Center icon, but it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut and isn’t keyboard navigable. It doesn’t even activate via the “Move focus to status menus” shortcut.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n