![]() When working on a project, I want to know whether the working directory is clean (so I can rebase or check out safely), or the size of my next pull request. I believe my setup meets all three goals, turning the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar into my preferred development environment. Keep the power consumption as low as possible.Remain un-distracting and aesthetically pleasing.Enhance a development-oriented workflow.In designing for my needs as a power user, I kept these goals in mind: However, I’d like to present my own heavily-tailored setup which iterates on existing presets as well as Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for the Touch Bar. These presets provide a great starting point for anyone looking to customize the Touch Bar. The GoldenChaos-BTT preset designed to offer “a complete Touch Bar UI replacement.”.Vasily Zubarev’s post detailing his annoyances with the Touch Bar and a preset containing BTT widgets that he found useful.Many people have already written about BetterTouchTool and offered unique Touch Bar presets. Perhaps one day Apple will provide a more streamlined and robust way to manage the Touch Bar, but until then BTT remains the best and only alternative. Be warned that BTT is very much designed for power users. The sole prerequisite to improving the Touch Bar for power users is BetterTouchTool (BTT), a multi-purpose application that also allows for extensive TouchBar customization. Although the design of the Touch Bar may improve the experience for casual users, it does so at the expense of power users. At best, the guidelines relegate the Touch Bar to triggering “obscure” keyboard shortcuts and menu items.īut what if the guidelines were read from a casual user’s point of view? Dynamic controls suddenly make sense casual users might already glance at the keyboard to perform non-standard actions, and such users may not know about advanced features buried behind a menu. Furthermore, since the Touch Bar cannot provide unique functionality, the benefits of the Touch Bar are very low. If the Touch Bar constantly changes based on context, then tapping the correct button cannot be done through muscle memory alone. Don’t expose functionality solely in the Touch Bar.Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display. ![]() Make the Touch Bar relevant to the current context on the main screen.When read from the perspective of a power user, Apple’s Design Considerations for the Touch Bar make little sense: With the right tools, I believe that it is possible to modify the Touch Bar and make it useful-even for power users. I submit that the limitations of the Touch Bar come from Apple’s restrictive design guidelines and lack of customization. It’s now up to the end-user to adapt the hardware and software to fit his or her needs. Yet Apple clearly sees the Touch Bar as the path forward. Two years later and the Touch Bar remains largely unchanged, with third-party adoption of Touch Bar APIs doing little to improve the usefulness for power users. First released in 2016, the Touch Bar MacBook Pro models received a fair amount of skepticism from the professional community.
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