I saw that, too. Their support matrix is fascinating: Safari pretty much anywhere or... Microsoft Edge. Any guesses why that is? Is this an HTML5 <video> DRM thing?
tldr: Now you can use a "TV" app with your appleTV to watch TV on your TV. Users have confirmed it's 100% awesome. It will also bring the family-friendly world of twitter into your living room.
Given how much time they are taking for iOS, I get the feeling that the Macintoshes are going to get a serious short shift. I guess the one machine rumor is starting to look true.
Am I the only one who finds it laughable that Apple thinks anybody wants to purchase or rent movies and tv shows through iTunes? The service is awful and the pricing even worse.
Many seem to be angry about the OLED toolbar, but I'm getting unusually exciting.
Just imagine the controls for your debugging environment on it. Or pressing a modifier and the display actually showing you a different set of shortcuts.
I had actually been looking around at programmable keyboards with active displays on every key. I want to switch to a keyboard-only workflow, but it is actually incredibly hard if you use a few applications. There's no standard for shortcuts, and not even a standard for defining custom shortcuts.
I'm hoping they're also launching a standalone keyboard in that style.
I could also imagine there will be transparent "screen protectors" that you could apply with raised bumps so as to give tactile feedback. At that point, I see no reason for vim users to complain (saying that as a vim user). Not that it will be too hard to find the left edge of the bar.
> I'm hoping they're also launching a standalone keyboard in that style.
Intriguing. Though if the touch bar is context sensitive how is your standalone keyboard going to be able to know what context you are in? Genuine question!
Not an expert on keyboard protocols, but I'm pretty sure both bluetooth and usb allow two-way communication.
Actually, it must already be happening, considering the Caps Lock indicator is set by the OS, not the keyboard itself (which is why people use it as a sort of brain-stem reflex test when the computer locks up).
I dunno. I'm pretty sure the flow of information is one way. I could be wrong. :( I think the keyboard logic circuit board handles the Caps Lock indicator.
I noticed the presenter doing this a few times. It definitely doesn't seem like a power-user thing to me. That said, I'll be holding off on a strong opinion on this until I get to use it. I could see it being either a usability nightmare or something super useful.
> At that point, I see no reason for vim users to complain (saying that as a vim user).
Other than the escape button is only available contextually, and has moved? Other than the function keys some of us use as more mappings (such as in insert mode) now require looking at the keyboard and using a chord (Fn-touchbar).
Of course, we can get used to it. Of course, we can just use another keyboard. Of course, we can learn alternate key bindings for escape. The change was unnecessary. Other companies have tried it and given way back to physical F keys - that should say something right there.
Here's a thought: instead of removing keys for a touchbar, why not make the screen touchable? That way you don't need extra controls and interfaces to allow for scrubbing, volume control, application launching, etc.
> Other than the escape button is only available contextually, and has moved?
what's the problem with "if context == vim -> show ESC". And that was at the far left as it has always been.
> Other companies have tried it
Tell that to Blackberry, or those Microsoft tablets.
> Here's a thought: instead of removing keys for a touchbar, why not make the screen touchable?
That would actually feel pretty useless. I'd always have my hands closer to the mouse or touchpad, and it feels really awkward to reach out to the screen.
Vim isn't an app - I'm guessing the context would have to be identified by Terminal and passed up the chain. Terminal isn't always the best at identifying the current running process for its window/tab names; relying on it to properly identify that Vim is running doesn't sound like a winning strategy.
> And that was at the far left as it has always been.
No, it's indented by half the width of the tilde key, whereas it was directly above the tilde key before.
> Tell that to Blackberry, or those Microsoft tablets.
Those are touchscreen devices, where you can touch the actual controls on the screen. I haven't yet seen another laptop with a touchbar which kept the touchbar for more than one generation.
> I'd always have my hands closer to the mouse or touchpad
Then you could continue to use the mouse and touchpad. The bottom of the screen is only about another inch or two above the touchbar as it stands now, and much more flexible in terms of what can appear there (such as website controls).
How many people actually touch-type F7? In fact, how many even use the function keys for anything but the media controls? So in most situations it will greatly increase discoverability for shortcuts. And the only key that was easy to hit blindly, relied on being at the left edge for that – which doesn't change.
If only they had the option to keep the function keys. My 2011 MBP has been serving me well all these years. Going to be difficult to justify giving it up.
I'd be sad to see physical function keys go. Maybe there'll be a gizmo that I can put over the TouchBar that gives me physical keys that can simulate touches for me. :)
Eh. They're far enough from home row that I rarely use them in any case, and there are some intriguing possibilities in the touch bar that make it potentially a worthwhile change.
On the other hand, I'm a very late adopter, and will probably be using my current (late 2013) MBP for another three to five years, so it's not as though I'm going to have to worry about being the infantry here. By the time I get around to even considering the possibility of a purchase, it'll long since have been known whether or not the touch bar is a gimmick.
Don't really care. I'm a vim user, but I use Ctrl-C instead of escape to get out of insert mode, etc.
What I find obnoxious is that the hardware is already a bit outdated. Also, they act as though this touch bar is such a huge innovation when it really isn't. It's minor. Give me a laptop I can use for coding and also has an Apple Pencil compatible touch screen I can use for note taking. I'd call that innovation. But Apple has decided, for all of us, that no one really wants this.
I will say, however, that the 4 thunderbolt 3 ports seem pretty useful. I also like how they're going with port-types that are standard instead of their usual proprietary nonsense.
This is beyond laughable. I am genuinely so sad that they finally ruined the MBP. Watching him tap the auto-suggested words on the 'Touch Bar' is so sad. I have a 3 year old MBP and I was looking forward to upgrading it, but not anymore.
It is beyond laughable? What exactly makes it laughable? Are you saying no consumer would want a customizable and context aware strip of buttons? Sure auto-suggested words might be useless for many of us who type exceptionally fast. But how about safari (or Chrome, or Firefox) navigation aware buttons? What about text formatting options? You can't think of any use for a context aware multi-touch haptic strip on the top of your keyboard?
I have spent the better part of the last number of years trying to keep my hands ON the keyboard and AWAY from the mouse. This will allow me to do that in interesting new ways. I actually hope they make a full size external keyboard with the same functionality.
Did you watch him typing an email and clicking the 'auto-suggested' words that were showing up?
I do concede that there are some good uses for it though.
When your hands are on the keyboard are you looking down at them to see where you are typing? Now you are going to take your eyes off the screen and see if the touch bar has something useful for you. I would imagine you are going to keep using the same keyboard shortcuts that you have used for years.
I sure did see him doing that. It's exactly the same auto-suggested functionality when typing an email on an iPad or a iPhone with the software keyboard or an iPad Pro with the smart keyboard. It's actually exactly the same functionality. I get it, it's on a laptop keyboard. He could have just typed that stuff. And the wording was funny. But it's a learning auto-suggest. With the iPad Pro I have found it strange how good it is at auto-suggesting what I often say in a conversation.
It makes sense to use on an iphone where typing is difficult, it doesn't make sense to touch any of those when i can type faster than reading those suggestions. That's obviously just my opinion.
Apple is forcing everyone to use the auto-complete suggestions on the touch bar with the latest OS update so that's what all these people are mad about. /s
The funniest part to me is just how AMAZED every presenter acts about using touch input with full desktop apps... as if they've invented something completely new and Microsoft and others haven't been doing this for years.
But you can now look down on your keyboard and select emojis right from the touch bar! What's not to love?! It's been a dream come true for professionals.
But seriously though, I kinda hate it but also think it could be useful in certain situations. Not sure what to make of it.
I know there's a lot of hate, but I think the Touch Bar is really exciting. The keyboard + trackpad paradigm could use a little innovation and evolution in light of many years of touch screens. I wish they had made the trackpad itself a touch screen, but I suspect that's an inevitability now.
I just hope that web pages can customize the Touch Bar too.
Imagine what they could have done with a touch screen instead... No need for special APIs or interfaces, just expose a button and people can click on it directly. Expose a slider and people can slide it! How innovative!
I find the OLED toolbar pretty interesting, and apparently well-implemented, but I am a little wary of how readily it recommends itself to a keyboard-based workflow. Most keyboards are designed such that I don't ever need to look away from my monitor. I just sort of think and my muscle memory does the work on the keyboard. Helpful affordances like physically distinguishable keys with different shapes, bumps on the homerow, and predictable, unchanging layout means that I can keep my eyes on the screen.
There are certain functionalities that might justify the cost of looking down (not to sound too melodramatic). But one of the examples that keeps cropping up is autocomplete. Which seems like a rather unnatural thing to put anywhere but the text it's completing. Wondering what else the expect to show up on this thing, in a location I currently don't really ever look at if I don't have to.
I suspect that looking at it won't take too much attention. It's at the top of the keyboard, it's just a slight glance down, and after some time with a particular app, you'll develop a good muscle memory for whatever features it offers that you want.
94 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadCan someone share the URL so I can stream via VLC or similar, please?
EDIT: Thank you @alva
first topic: Apple is launching a new accessibility website
It's a standards draft, but not a standard, so it's more that Edge implemented this particular draft feature, whereas Chrome/Firefox have not.
edit: tv shows, not tvs. lol
Just imagine the controls for your debugging environment on it. Or pressing a modifier and the display actually showing you a different set of shortcuts.
I had actually been looking around at programmable keyboards with active displays on every key. I want to switch to a keyboard-only workflow, but it is actually incredibly hard if you use a few applications. There's no standard for shortcuts, and not even a standard for defining custom shortcuts.
I'm hoping they're also launching a standalone keyboard in that style.
I could also imagine there will be transparent "screen protectors" that you could apply with raised bumps so as to give tactile feedback. At that point, I see no reason for vim users to complain (saying that as a vim user). Not that it will be too hard to find the left edge of the bar.
Intriguing. Though if the touch bar is context sensitive how is your standalone keyboard going to be able to know what context you are in? Genuine question!
Actually, it must already be happening, considering the Caps Lock indicator is set by the OS, not the keyboard itself (which is why people use it as a sort of brain-stem reflex test when the computer locks up).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard#Connection
Other than the escape button is only available contextually, and has moved? Other than the function keys some of us use as more mappings (such as in insert mode) now require looking at the keyboard and using a chord (Fn-touchbar).
Of course, we can get used to it. Of course, we can just use another keyboard. Of course, we can learn alternate key bindings for escape. The change was unnecessary. Other companies have tried it and given way back to physical F keys - that should say something right there.
Here's a thought: instead of removing keys for a touchbar, why not make the screen touchable? That way you don't need extra controls and interfaces to allow for scrubbing, volume control, application launching, etc.
what's the problem with "if context == vim -> show ESC". And that was at the far left as it has always been.
> Other companies have tried it
Tell that to Blackberry, or those Microsoft tablets.
> Here's a thought: instead of removing keys for a touchbar, why not make the screen touchable?
That would actually feel pretty useless. I'd always have my hands closer to the mouse or touchpad, and it feels really awkward to reach out to the screen.
> And that was at the far left as it has always been.
No, it's indented by half the width of the tilde key, whereas it was directly above the tilde key before.
> Tell that to Blackberry, or those Microsoft tablets.
Those are touchscreen devices, where you can touch the actual controls on the screen. I haven't yet seen another laptop with a touchbar which kept the touchbar for more than one generation.
> I'd always have my hands closer to the mouse or touchpad
Then you could continue to use the mouse and touchpad. The bottom of the screen is only about another inch or two above the touchbar as it stands now, and much more flexible in terms of what can appear there (such as website controls).
Edit: Also, if you hold down the function key, the function buttons come back.
On the other hand, I'm a very late adopter, and will probably be using my current (late 2013) MBP for another three to five years, so it's not as though I'm going to have to worry about being the infantry here. By the time I get around to even considering the possibility of a purchase, it'll long since have been known whether or not the touch bar is a gimmick.
What I find obnoxious is that the hardware is already a bit outdated. Also, they act as though this touch bar is such a huge innovation when it really isn't. It's minor. Give me a laptop I can use for coding and also has an Apple Pencil compatible touch screen I can use for note taking. I'd call that innovation. But Apple has decided, for all of us, that no one really wants this.
I will say, however, that the 4 thunderbolt 3 ports seem pretty useful. I also like how they're going with port-types that are standard instead of their usual proprietary nonsense.
I have spent the better part of the last number of years trying to keep my hands ON the keyboard and AWAY from the mouse. This will allow me to do that in interesting new ways. I actually hope they make a full size external keyboard with the same functionality.
I do concede that there are some good uses for it though.
When your hands are on the keyboard are you looking down at them to see where you are typing? Now you are going to take your eyes off the screen and see if the touch bar has something useful for you. I would imagine you are going to keep using the same keyboard shortcuts that you have used for years.
[edited]
But seriously though, I kinda hate it but also think it could be useful in certain situations. Not sure what to make of it.
Every presenter has the same kind of rhythm and timing. I wonder who coaches them?
A couple of thoughts:
* What advantages does the Touch Bar have over chording? One I can think of is less need for memorization.
* One advantage of physical keys is the physical keypress. I can imagine Apple adding taptic feedback in the future.
All and all, I think this is a good move forward.
* Is the the Touch Bar the new <marquee> /s
I just hope that web pages can customize the Touch Bar too.
There are certain functionalities that might justify the cost of looking down (not to sound too melodramatic). But one of the examples that keeps cropping up is autocomplete. Which seems like a rather unnatural thing to put anywhere but the text it's completing. Wondering what else the expect to show up on this thing, in a location I currently don't really ever look at if I don't have to.