"So I have to move my head up and down all the time."
I believe that for the use-case of Touch Bar as slider, it has similar behavioral characteristics as a trackpad. Do you use a trackpad? Or a mouse? Do you find yourself moving your eyes back and forth between the screen and the trackpad or mouse? Honest questions. I'm not trying to be snarky :)
As for custom keys, I think this has more in common with chording/key commands. There is the distinction that there aren't physical keys, but in the case of key commands, I know I'm not thinking, say, ⌘-Z when I undo. I'm just thinking Undo. And many key commands are application dependent. As I get used to whatever custom keys I've got programmed or are made available by an application, there'll be some period of acclimation, and then it'll just become habit. Perhaps to offset the lack of physical gaps between keys there will be larger target areas on the Touch Bar.
What do you think? Are these comparisons useful? If not, what are their limitations?
I do think the Touch Bar would benefit from some kind of haptic response, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the direction it goes.
I also wouldn't be surprised if at some time in the future there is a touch screen for Macs. That doesn't mean that Apple is ready to release such a MacBook yet (for whatever reason), or that the Touch Bar isn't a valid feature. And while it's generating a lot of heat at this point, until there are a lot more hands-on (cough) reports, I think it's prudent to remember a lot of this is speculation, both for and against.
Edit to add: If you choose to down vote, please take the time to reply with a comment as well in the interest of communication. Thanks!
Trackpad, mouse, etc, is not a good comparable. Unlike a trackpad or mouse, the touch bar is a video display. Being a display implies visual interaction, and the lack of physical feedback will make 'touch typing' the touch bar difficult.
Yes, it has a display component. I don't see how that implies it must always be used by looking at it. Keys (usually) have labels on them, yet many people don't use the labels as reference once they're accustomed to touch typing.
Learning key commands can be a chore, requiring use of the manual or discovery through menus. Do you remember cards provided with some applications that included lists of command key commands? The Touch Bar makes things like that instantly available. And once you learn where they are, you don't need to be looking at them.
There are probably going to be some interesting interaction possibilities where we're going to want use the Touch Bar in a more visual way.
One I can think of is the autocomplete demo during the Hello Again event. I personally think autocomplete would be better served keyboard alone in a manner similar to how the spelling and grammar suggestions work, rather than through the Touch Bar, but again, that's not having used it.
I completely agree that it is a new input device. Just not completely new. Some things are going to carry over from the keyboard, the trackpad, and the touch screen. And I agree the lack of physical response may take some getting used to. As I mentioned, I think we'll see improvements on this in the future.
You're missing the 'physical feedback' component. People don't need to look at labels on keys, because they can feel the keys. A smooth bit of touchscreen has no 'landmarks' to orient yourself with.
> I completely agree that it is a new input device. Just not completely new
Yep. Lenovo introduced one a couple of years ago in their X1 Carbons. It was hated so much that it was stripped out of the next gen.
Ultimately, the only benefit of the touchbar is the ability to be used as a slider, but you lose discrete keys to get that. How many things would such a slider be useful for? People aren't changing their volume all that often, and what real difference is there between a slider and a pair of volume buttons (media keys) anyway?
"Yep. Lenovo introduced one a couple of years ago in their X1 Carbons. It was hated so much that it was stripped out of the next gen."
From the reading I've done this morning on the 2014 X1 Carbon (the only model that had the Adaptive Keyboard replacing the function row), there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the keyboard and trackpad as a whole, not only the strip. Among others, they removed the physical keys from the trackpad, moved the Home and End keys to the Caps Lock location, and removed other keys entirely. I read a lot of complaints about all of these, and all of these were reverted in the 2015 version.
Yeah, people are discussing the removal of the ESC key on the MacBook Pro as well. I'm personally going to miss the dedicated volume and brightness keys, and I use the ESC key in conjunction with Command to trigger LaunchBar, which I use heavily. I also think I'll be able to get used to it. There was a time in my life when I didn't use LaunchBar, and before I had dedicated volume and brightness keys. I don't remember it being all that bad. I'll see, when I get around to getting a new machine. I'm sure there are those who use the function row much more heavily than I. In the absence of aggregate data, I really can't comment on much more than my own experience and read about others.
Lenovo's decision to revert everything could be seen as them deciding it wasn't in their best interest to determine which changes were worth keeping. This is all speculation, of course. And they could very well have determined that all of the changes were ruinous to some degree. It's really pretty impressive that Lenovo was willing to make so many changes to their keyboard, when, AIUI, the keyboard is one of the features that keeps people coming back to Lenovo in general.
In the MacBook Pro, they're only replacing the function row with the Touch Bar. From an experimental point of view, it's a much more focussed experiment. It'll be interesting to see what happens when it's actually had more use.
In theory, you wouldn't need landmarks because the keys below are the landmarks. Unfortunately, the dynamic actions don't seem to line up with the number keys so I don't know how that will work in practice.
The size and location of the dynamic actions/custom keys isn't fixed (unlike, say physical keys each with its own display), so I'm not sure if alignment makes sense in this case. Or am I misinterpreting what you mean?
That said, I think they can have the same "fixed" location for a given use case. Just like you can remap a keyboard so Caps Lock can mean Control, once you do that, Control will be at the same location (the Caps Lock key). Once you're used to that location, things work fine.
Regarding kyboard shortcuts Mac OS HIG Guidelines says:
> Avoid using the Touch Bar for tasks associated with well-known keyboard shortcuts. In general, the Touch Bar shouldn’t include controls for tasks such as find, select all, deselect, copy, cut, paste, undo, redo, new, save, close, print, and quit. It also shouldn’t include controls that replicate key-based navigation, such as page up and page down.
Thanks for the reference to the HIG. To be clear, I was using Undo/⌘-Z as an example of how I think about keyboard shortcuts as command rather than the specific keystrokes. I wasn't suggesting that Undo should have a place on the Touch Bar.
Besides providing the reference, was there something you intended to convey with the quote?
> Besides providing the reference, was there something you intended to convey with the quote?
Only that Touchbar seems intended to be very dynamic and have constantly changing mappings. So there will not be much consistency across apps, especially since common shortcuts shouldn't be put there.
Gotcha. I agree that there will not be much consistency across apps, and I think that's the beauty of it. And yeah, what's available on the Touch Bar can potentially be very context dependent.
Actually, I could see undo on the Touch Bar being useful. I'd use cmd-Z most of the time, of course, but on more than one occasion I wished I could see what the undo command would actually do (Finder operations, among others). A 'button' on the task bar that explicitly states what will be undone could be great.
> Do you use a trackpad? Or a mouse? Do you find yourself moving your eyes back and forth between the screen and the trackpad or mouse? Honest questions. I'm not trying to be snarky :)
I think the difference is that the feedback you get on the trackpad/mouse is on the screen. It doesn't need you to look down. The same thing could not probably be said of the touchbar.
Is that so? If you're scrubbing the controller on the Touch Bar, you see the result on the screen, don't you? From the demo video, when scrubbing video, there is a keyframe on the Touch Bar, but you're also seeing the change on the screen.
Also, looking at my keyboard, the angle difference between looking at the function row to about 1 inch above the bottom of the screen (which I estimate to be the roughly the same as where a scrubber would be), is about ¼ to ⅓ of the angular distance from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen. I think it's useful to consider how the location of the Touch Bar and its display will affect our UX. In this case, I think the concern might be overrated, given how much we're currently accustomed to moving our eyes with our existing screens.
Please note that I'm not saying you'll never look at the Touch Bar. I do think there will many cases when muscle memory will be as effective as what we're used to with a trackpad or keyboard.
> If you're scrubbing the controller on the Touch Bar, you see the result on the screen, don't you?
What if you touch the wrong part of the bar and accidentally do something else? I personally have trouble believing that I'd be able to consistently touch the right part of the bar without looking every time without there being an actual physical divide between the sections even if I did consistently remember the layout and functionality for every app I used. I think peripheral vision would help here, although that goes out the window if you're hooked up to a monitor and still using the built-in keyboard.
I believe that for the use-case of Touch Bar as slider, it has similar behavioral characteristics as a trackpad. Do you use a trackpad? Or a mouse? Do you find yourself moving your eyes back and forth between the screen and the trackpad or mouse? Honest questions. I'm not trying to be snarky :)
As for custom keys, I think this has more in common with chording/key commands. There is the distinction that there aren't physical keys, but in the case of key commands, I know I'm not thinking, say, ⌘-Z when I undo. I'm just thinking Undo. And many key commands are application dependent. As I get used to whatever custom keys I've got programmed or are made available by an application, there'll be some period of acclimation, and then it'll just become habit. Perhaps to offset the lack of physical gaps between keys there will be larger target areas on the Touch Bar.
What do you think? Are these comparisons useful? If not, what are their limitations?
I do think the Touch Bar would benefit from some kind of haptic response, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the direction it goes.
I also wouldn't be surprised if at some time in the future there is a touch screen for Macs. That doesn't mean that Apple is ready to release such a MacBook yet (for whatever reason), or that the Touch Bar isn't a valid feature. And while it's generating a lot of heat at this point, until there are a lot more hands-on (cough) reports, I think it's prudent to remember a lot of this is speculation, both for and against.
Edit to add: If you choose to down vote, please take the time to reply with a comment as well in the interest of communication. Thanks!