To what exact cases are you referring? Do you not use an ide with a test runner? What exactly is desirable about triggering and monitoring this from a second display on the keyboard--where you're looking all the time, naturally--over clicking a button on screen?
Take a good look at the IDE running there. It's Vim. I use that all the time, and so do many other people on HN.
Do you need a button like this on your keyboard? No, you could set up a new Vim bind. But this is more dynamic; what if the test re-run buttons were only visible after having modified a file, and replaced with a deploy or commit button if tests succeed?
If you're vigorously opposed to it, don't buy a Mac. But some people can definitely see use in it. It's like your function row, but with visibly context-aware functions.
Would vim be fun/useful to use on an iPad? Because, I think that is what your argument really says...
>But this is more dynamic; what if the test re-run buttons were only visible after having modified a file, and replaced with a deploy or commit button if tests succeed?
More dynamic in that you have to look away from your work to trigger a re-run? Or more dynamic in that its completely worthless if you use an external display and external keyboard? Or more dynamic in that it's another avenue for show-stopping macOS bugs?
The computer already has a fantastic dynamic display built in—the display. Your eyes even naturally fall there. Why do we need a second display at all, much less on the keyboard where people do not look?
Unless you're touch-typing your function keys, you certainly do look there.
I don't want a "second display"; I want dynamic, context-aware buttons. Focusing on the fact that it's "another display" misses all the benefits of it not being static hardware buttons.
The buttons on your keyboard are already context aware. All this does is make them difficult/impossible to touch type (I touch type my F-keys), forces me to look away from my display to perform operations, and removes the good tactile feedback you get from a keypress.
"Context-aware" as in the applications you use will decide what to do with the inputs, I guess, sure. The applications you use being able to create their own inputs is an entirely different thing and what I meant by "context-aware".
I agree, though, that the lack of feedback was a mistake.
With PyCharm and most Jetbrains IDEs I can remap keys to run test. So pressing two or three keys will run tests AND!!! I don't have to look at my keyboard to run the tests NOR see the results.
Meanwhile, the other 90% of users will probably love it when their IDE, profiler, every browser's developer tools, etc. can display context-appropriate labels so they don't need to remember what F8 does in the current mode of the current application.
My emacs already does that if I want it to. My vim did it before I switched to spacemacs. I still don't understand why you'd want to give up physical buttons for an awkwardly angled small touchscreen that requires using your laptop's keyboard.
Yeah, but you're ignoring the functionality loss from not having the function keys. You may not use them, but many people do.
For example, in Emacs (and I'm assuming most IDEs) I can map a function key to run my tests and have a status bar entry saying how many passed or failed. It's the exact functionality in your screenshot, no touch bar required.
At best the touch bar is a nice gimmick, and it's not adding anything you can't already do, and the trade off is the function keys. They could have just as easily left the function keys alone and added the touch bar above.
> The standard "function keys can do anything" response is getting old.
That "function keys can do anything" is, in my opinion, the exact reason they had to go. They're scary for the typical user. What is F7? You may know, but it's not obvious in any way. That some of them cause destructive actions (e.g. Alt+F4 on Windows) makes it worse - they're scary to many users. And even when after figuring out what some of them do, one is stuck wondering "was that F8? Or F9? Oh! It was F10" (which, includes the worry that a wrong guess could cause problems).
Though, I cannot believe they shipped it without the haptic feedback to make it clear that a button was actually clicked.
^ Also, none of that, to me, includes Esc. Esc seems clear enough in its intent, and I hold no ill-will toward the Esc key.
Exactly. Particularly once you jump between a few apps, and as I said elsewhere, I can't use media/volume/display controls and f-keys without the function key, so I don't use the f-keys on my existing MBP.
The way that for the last couple generations the touchpad hasn't actually "clicked", and been simulated by haptic feedback. That same feeling on the Esc/Cancel/etc. virtual button would alleviate most of my personal concerns.
I'm surprised they didn't include it given how much they've been pushing it on iOS, as well as on the touchpad of Macs.
Adding 'touch' to a UI designed for mouse/trackpad + keyboard interaction is inherently a terrible idea. Even my pinky finger is much bigger than the cursor. I would have zero chance of being accurate with it.
Also, that still requires the actual controls to be on-screen somewhere. With the touch bar, you can opt to not have those controls (e.g. a toolbar in an IDE, or a palette in a visual tool like photoshop) shown on the main display if they're available when contextually relevant, on the touch bar.
That seems entirely unrelated to what you quoted. Regardless of whether the whole screen becomes a touchscreen, or a bar is used, the F-keys in their form are bad UX.
But "full colour multitouch interfaces" are awful compared to keyboard keys! Getting to switch back to my mouse + kb after using my phone is so fantastic.
This bar is all the bad stuff about a touchscreen (limited/no tactile feedback, reduced ability to rely on muscle memory) plus the bad stuff about keyboards (primarily that they are not where your eyes are naturally). There are a few tiny niche uses cases that will be nice, like video scrubbing, but 90% of the time it's just going to be functionality that is more difficult to use than it was previously.
I'm pretty sure I hate the current situation with F-Keys at least as much as you claim to hate multi-touch interfaces.
If you truly use F-Keys by touch (i.e. without looking) forcing the touch bar into F-Key mode should get you pretty close to what you had anyway.
The F-Keys don't have the little identifying lumps (on mine these are on F & J), so you simply have to know where they are by muscle memory. The only difference is you're tapping like a track-pad tap (as opposed to trackpad click).
On a proper IBM-M style keyboard layout, the F keys are in groups of four, with spaces between each group. This makes it trivial to touch-type them without looking.
It's really a very well laid out keyboard design. The worst thing about laptop keyboards is that they are all so non-standard, and every manufacturer does their own special-snowflake thing, so that it is almost impossible to touch-type on an unfamiliar machine.
But they didn't add a dedicated hardware video scrubber. They added a dedicated hardware input device that can present basically any type of input. Those are just examples of what's possible that wasn't possible before.
You're not losing function keys, they're just becoming more powerful. You can still set the touch area to be a row of function keys, if you like that! Or they might become more dynamic, by updating which binds are available based on what's on screen.
It is a nice gimmick. Is there anything wrong with an improvement, even if it's a little one?
First, your F keys already change binds based on what's on screen. Second, you are ignoring all the things that are worse. You can't really touch type any more, you have to take your eyes away from the screen, and you get greatly reduced tactile feedback.
It is a gimmick, but in my opinion it's not an improvement, it's counterproductive.
