Apple says no fun allowed on the Touch Bar

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/27/apple-says-no-fun-allowed-on-the-touch-bar/

by kyriakos • 10 years ago

48 100 10 years ago

dvcc• 10 years ago

I await the first few apps to put ads on the Touch Bar. It seems all but inevitable.

Razengan3• 10 years ago

If I understand correctly it's like the Menu Bar, so only the application that's currently in focus will get to display stuff on it; they won't be able to hijack it from the background.

Frankly, if an app insists on showing me ads while I'm using it, I'd rather that they be on the Touch Bar instead of the main screen.

stcredzero2• 10 years ago

How long before some application hijacks focus by only pretending to give it up, just so it can display ads? (Also, maybe record keystrokes.)

mortenjorck• 10 years ago

Doubtful, mostly because there just isn't that much ad-supported software on OS X / macOS. And Safari certainly doesn't expose any access to it.

Terribledactyl• 10 years ago

I believe with safari open, you see a representation (favicon? I don't know) of your open tabs and favorites. I bet something could leak through there, at least with a desperate enough site.

guywithabike• 10 years ago

How would that be different than just putting ads right on the main display?

awesomerobot5• 10 years ago

I mean honestly it would be preferable to ads on the main display. Either way, if I didn't want to use an application with ads I'd just uninstall it.

Razengan3• 10 years ago

Good, sensible guidelines from Apple, and it's not like you can't ignore them and distribute your app outside the Mac App Store.

curiousgal• 10 years ago

Yet another huge FU to developers.

st3v3r3• 10 years ago

No, it isn't. Nothing on this laptop is anywhere near an "FU" to developers.

budde2• 10 years ago

As a macOS user, I'm pretty pleased Apple is discouraging the use of the Touch Bar as yet more real estate for 'innovative' developers to plaster unwanted notifications or other distracting garbage. Besides, if you have a compelling non-approved use of the touch bar nothing is stopping you from distributing it outside of the Mac App Store.

Now if only they could take a look at the user-hostile default "allow" option on the dialog Safari presents when a website wants to start sending you push notifications...

rayiner• 10 years ago

Who wouldn’t want a stock ticker there, or a Twitter feed, or a progress bar for downloads and file operations? There are plenty of possibilities to explore here, and it seems a disservice to insist that things remain monochrome, key-shaped and static.

No Mac user has ever thought "gee, this third party design is so much more tasteful than something that follows the HIG!" Apple is right to keep designers on a tight leash.

c54• 10 years ago

I can't tell if this comment is sarcastic. Are you saying that apple's specified design is always better than anything else?

gaze2• 10 years ago

no, but averaging over most developers it's way better.

qyv• 10 years ago

Think different... as long as it is well within the defined manufactures guidelines.

pcwalton• 10 years ago

No Mac user has ever thought "gee, this third party design is so much more tasteful than something that follows the HIG!"

Apple stopped following the HIG a long time ago. Even Gruber admitted it back in 2011. http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/uniformity_vs_individualit...

That article, by the way, is about a good counterexample to your point (Twitter for Mac).

thefastlane2• 10 years ago

they took away the Esc key and all the Fn keys. Apple's HIG is dead to me now.

budde2• 10 years ago

Doesn't holding down the "fn" key bring them all back though?

acdha2• 10 years ago

Just looking at http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/ shows that's not true:

http://images.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/j/images/overview/touc...

Maybe wait to actually use one before trying to rally the mob with pitchforks and torches?

cuddlybacon• 10 years ago

A stock ticker or Twitter feed sound just awful to me. Hopefully when developers find a way to ship features like that, I have a way to remove that crap.

rcthompson• 10 years ago

Just don't use the offending app. The bar's content always belongs to the foreground app.

CamperBob2• 10 years ago

That's a solid 9.5/10 on the Poe's Law scale.

kemiller2002• 10 years ago

Really? You know what I expected on the keyboard? The escape key, but clearly Apple didn't have a problem with violating that expectation.

eridius7• 10 years ago

This is getting really old really fast. Plus, the Touch Bar does actually have an escape key by default.

tjohns• 10 years ago

Several screenshots show that a escape key can be placed on the touch bar by apps that need it (e.g. Terminal).

There's certainly a good argument that physical keys are better, due to tactile positioning and response. But there's still a virtual escape "key".

(And on a related note: Folks could make the same argument about the F13/F14/F15/Help buttons that are traditionally on a Mac keyboard. Or the lack of Print Screen/Break/Scroll Lock from Apple keyboards in general. Keyboard layouts actually do change with time. Heck, look at the "Space Cadet Keyboard" from an MIT Lisp machine to see how much things have changed.)

wesleytodd• 10 years ago

"Don't be creative with this new tool we made for creative people" -Apple

Typical Apple restricting the ecosystem. Guess we all knew what we were getting ourselves into.

st3v3r3• 10 years ago

It's not like they're going to ban apps that do this. They're just saying, "These are the best ways to use this thing."

tinus_hn3• 10 years ago

What is the difference between a rule and a guideline?

fabrika• 10 years ago

How are they going to control this for non-App Store apps?

mazlix• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure its only talking about App Store apps.

baefage• 10 years ago

But maybe they'll make it hard or even impossible for apps outside the MAS to use the touch bar.

xenadu02• 10 years ago

These are just guidelines. You can submit apps to the App Store that violate them if it makes sense for your app; people do it on iOS all the time.

st3v3r3• 10 years ago

They're not going to control it for any apps, App Store or non. It's a guideline. They're just saying, "Based on our research developing this thing, these are the things you do and do not want to do when developing for it." Same as any other company that makes any other thing does.

SysArchitect• 10 years ago

Only the currently selected foreground application gets to use the TouchBar and display content on it.

Which means apps distributed outside of the app store when they have focus are allowed to put whatever they want on the TouchBar and you are allowed to close and delete the app.

Problem solved.

cphoover• 10 years ago

Would be cool to put a code editor minimap on the touch bar.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

ed is back.

ccvannorman• 10 years ago

I've read a TON of pushback on HN about the new touch bar. After reading this article it dawned on me -- the reason I hate the touch bar is because it isn't tactile. Instead of feeling for the volume up/mute/lightness up/down buttons, I'll have to stick my face into my keyboard to know what I'm pressing.

My solution would be allowing individual pressable physical keys to be changed via LED display, so that I can still feel them, but developers can modify what that key means. Yeah this would disable "sliding" which I don't care about.. is anyone with me on this? I hate having to look at things.

bcheung2• 10 years ago

I like the idea of having physical keys having their own screens but I definitely still like sliding as well. It's extremely useful for scrubbing through video, photo albums, photo adjustment sliders, etc.

tdb7893• 10 years ago

wasn't there an e-ink keyboard on here a little ago?

strictnein• 10 years ago

There have been OLED keyboards and Apple replacing the Function keys with OLED keys would have been a great idea.

There's a whole bunch of cool keyboard products with various types of screens:

http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/

eridius7• 10 years ago

There's a bunch of external keyboards that do this already. AFAIK, none of them have proved to be particularly popular or have a lot of developer support.

As a side note, I don't think I've ever pressed volume up/down or brightness up/down without looking at the keyboard first. I simply don't press them often enough to have muscle memory for their location, and every keyboard I use puts them in slightly different places anyway.

mi100hael• 10 years ago

To each their own, but I use esc heavily in vim, and brightness & volume are one in from each edge on all mac keyboards that I'm aware of, so they are easy to hit without looking. Lack of tactile buttons is going to be a huge pain in the ass.

wvenable2• 10 years ago

Wouldn't you still have to look to see what key is currently what?

elboru2• 10 years ago

Maybe for new software, but if you're constantly using the same application you'll remember where the main functions are. And that's where you really need it (applications that you regularly use)

elboru2• 10 years ago

I agree, touch feedback from a physical button is important. We lost that with touchscreens, I remember I used to be able to text without looking at my phone, not even at the screen, I used to be sure I pressed the correct buttons because of the feedback they give.

The same applies to music on my phone, I was able to change songs without checking on the screen where the "next" button is. I was an advocate of smartphones with hidden physical keyboards, but they didn't seem to catch up, not even with last blackberry's attempt, because they're not "cool" I guess...

anexprogrammer• 10 years ago

That seemed to be the consensus in the E-Ink Keyboard thread a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830307

bcheung2• 10 years ago

There goes my pong controller.

WiseWeasel• 10 years ago

FWIW, the guidelines suggest not using the Touch Bar as an output device, i.e. as an extension of the screen, not that you shouldn't use it as an input device. Pong paddle control should still be an acceptable use of the bar.

tn132• 10 years ago

The primary reason for this may not be that Apple does not want you to do it but it is probably the hardware and software that powers this feature is probably not robust enough to handle that creative potential. In short this is a substandard piece you are buying.

I will be surprised if someone does not hack and if apple does not provide a proper API support to modify and have fun with this feature.

matt40772• 10 years ago

Well they showed a dj using it to control a synthesizer during the keynote, so I think (in short) that was a substandard comment I was reading.

tn132• 10 years ago

What do you think is the delta between orchestrated demo v/s real usability of a particular feature ?

stcredzero2• 10 years ago

Now, admittedly, some of these things could be annoying or pulled off poorly.

This is one of the things that Apple has always been serious about doing right. Generally, devs who complain about this class of things are proved wrong in a few years. (Remember all of the outrage about background processes from the 2nd gen iPhone era?)

That said, even Apple is getting less Apple-y in this regard.

eridius7• 10 years ago

I'm not sure the article author really understands how the Touch Bar works.

I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how it could act as a Rainmeter or MenuMeters-like at-a-glance view of my machine.

People are going to experiment with toys for the Touch Bar, sure, but nobody's going to actually try and publish a game for one. Not only would the audience be very small, but the Touch Bar itself is so limited that you're not going to be able to make a game for it that's worth buying. However, normal games can and should use the Touch Bar to extend the keyboard to do great stuff (e.g. RPGs could put Inventory, Character Sheet, Skills, etc as buttons on the Touch Bar, or use it as an alternative input for controlling some types of abilities).

As for MenuMeters-like at-a-glance, this is why I say the author doesn't seem to understand how it works, because the only way you could have an at-a-glance view in the Touch Bar is if you actually put focus on the app that provides it. You cannot have a background app that provides Touch Bar content (like you can for stuff in the menubar). The foreground app controls what's on the Touch Bar. So the only way to have at-a-glance meters on it is if the foreground app is the one providing those meters. And if you have to put focus on a particular app to see your meters, then it's not really at-a-glance after all, and it would be quicker and easier (and actually usable for people without Touch Bars) to simply have that app show the status on the screen when you give it focus.

no_wave• 10 years ago

The RPG idea is something that has been tried for ages - the earliest example I can remember is the "Chocobo World" minigame on specific interactive memory cartridges for Final Fantasy VIII for the Playstation I. More recent examples include the Game Boy integration with the Wii and the default controller screen for the Wii U console.

None of these attempts ended up being very successful with the exception of the wildly successful Nintendo DS, which is different in a lot of ways (in that the real estate size between the touch screen and the real screen is equal).

The objection that a lot of people here have to the touch bar is that it's a sort-of-nice-to-have, never-essential feature used on very few machines, and these are the sorts of features that developers instinctively smell danger around.

eridius7• 10 years ago

What you describe is not the "RPG idea" I was describing. It's literally the opposite. I was talking about using the Touch Bar the way the HIG recommends, putting buttons on it that do the same thing that you'd otherwise do with buttons on the HUD or keyboard shortcuts. I was absolutely not suggesting that you should have controls on the Touch Bar that are only accessible from the Touch Bar.

awesomerobot5• 10 years ago

I mean, you could do all of that — Apple just won't let you.

randyrand• 10 years ago

On OSX you can distribute an executable without Apple's permission. The touchbar API may or may not support all use cases, but reverse engineering the lower level interface is probably not too hard.

eridius7• 10 years ago

That's completely backwards. Apple does not have rules stopping anyone from doing anything with the Touch Bar. The HIG is a set of guidelines, not rules (which is why it's called Human Interface Guidelines), you can violate the HIG all you want and still get in the App Store. The whole point of my last paragraph was to describe why the HIG isn't what's stopping you from doing something like MenuMeters, the way the system itself works is what's stopping you. The frontmost app gets control of the Touch Bar. If you're not the frontmost app, you can't touch it.

Namrog84• 10 years ago

I'm not sure how it is on Mac. But it's pretty trivial to get any exe in windows to run as a child of some tools.

E.g. I wrote a personal packet manipulator for visual studio. And added a registry key. So whenever you open any Devenv.exe it launches my program with devenv as an argument. To a normal person it's 100% not noticeable. But I'm the parent and could in this example perhaps Control the touchbar.

Tl Dr you can probably wrap a utility around other programs to have passive use. And/or inject tweak how controlbar looks at active window. Just force it to not update after its locked on.

eridius7• 10 years ago

I don't think there's any way to do something like that on OS X. Nor do I think it would change anything. The Touch Bar is controlled by the app with focus, not by its parent process. Process parent chains AFAIK have zero effect on communication with the Window Server (which is presumably how the Touch Bar APIs work).

comex• 10 years ago

This article is very misleading. Apple has always had UI guidelines (HIG); that doesn't mean they ban apps that don't follow them. It's a recommendation, not a proscription.

delinka• 10 years ago

Only the foreground app gets to put things in the touch bar. Excellent - I don't want some background process putting animated ads there.

Beyond that, Apple can't possibly limit what the foreground app does. Distribute your tasteless animating app with a Developer ID cert, and annoy people to your heart's content.

I do want a screensaver that also uses the touch bar. Nyan Cat is acceptable in this context.

Spivak• 10 years ago

I don't want some background process putting animated ads there.

If you are legitimately worried about this then I am in horror of what software you're running on your computer.

I could understand having it require user approval but forbidding it entirely seems short sighted.

awesomerobot5• 10 years ago

If I had an application that advertised to me like that I'd just uninstall it immediately, like I do on my phone.

I think a lot of people in this thread are getting so riled up about bad design the only alternative they see is totalitarianism.

In this case I think if you're giving an application your focus it should be able to use a secondary screen however the user wants it to. If the experience is bad people won't use your app.

Apple is instead saying "we know what all the good experiences are, so don't go having any bright ideas" — hopefully they won't strongly enforce any of their "guidelines"

tinus_hn3• 10 years ago

Apple does not control the software you put on your Mac. They do not forbid you from doing anything.

TeMPOraL4• 10 years ago

Nyan Cat is acceptable in this context.

If someone can borrow me a new Mac, I'll happily work on getting nyan-mode for Emacs to display there. ;).

skeptic2718• 10 years ago

Given they showed some pretty interactive demos in the keynote, I'm thinking it's all allowed if you're Apple but 3rd-party developers should be concerned.

kprybol• 10 years ago

I'm kind of OK with this. Yea I think that there are a ton of really cool/interesting things that could be done with the touch bar, but given that it serves the important role of being the power button and controlling user access via TouchID, I really wouldn't want to risk either of those functionalities even if it means less "fun".

orbitingpluto• 10 years ago

Given that displays favor landscape over portrait, there's a lot of free space above the numbers. My bet is that the next iteration will have the function keys and the touch bar after the alienation of developers becomes apparent to Apple.

pyrophane2• 10 years ago

How many negative posts about the new MacBook have graced the front-page of HN since the announcement? It feels like a lot.

I don't really understand the degree of animosity that the new MBP is drawing. Apple isn't, nor have they ever really been, the makers of the ultimate dev machine. They were always just the company that makes a laptop with decent power that was actually a laptop (not a desktop with a hinge in the back) which ran a unix that was, for many, more pleasant to use than linux. That hasn't changed with this release.

Would I like them to maybe be a little less obsessive about thinness if it meant getting a keyboard with a bit more travel? Sure.

Do I think that maybe a 32GB of RAM might not be quite the battery-killing trade-off that Phil implies? Kinda. Do I expect Apple to give me the option to make that choice on my own? Not a chance.

And when it comes to the Touch Bar, I didn't really expect Apple to make this a free-for-all for developers. They've long had this tendency to want to control how developers use these new features to ensure that it doesn't get away from their vision. But will someone figure out how to hack the Touch Bar and make it do some very interesting things? Oh, absolutely.

gosubpl• 10 years ago

"obsessive with thinness"? new MacBookPro - 14.9 mm MacBook - 13.0 mm Asus UX305 - 12.3 mm Samsung Series 9 900X3 - 13.0 mm

I don't think we can call that obsession. And please note that both Asus and Samsung have keyboards with around 2mm travel - laptop standard.

pyrophane2• 10 years ago

My biggest concern is that I won't like the keyboard, but I do most of my typing on an external keyboard anyway, so I suppose it won't be the end of the world. Once you get used to a mechanical keyboard it is hard to go back to typing on any laptop keyboard.

khedoros14• 10 years ago

For a number of years, a lot of developers considered Apple hardware to be the best-available dev machine (powerful hardware with nice design, good connectivity, pleasant but powerful OS? Nice). I think that it was a result of coincidence. Developers aren't really who they're targeting, but coincidentally computers that were nice for their market were also nice dev machines.

I expect Apple to design for their intended customers. I also expect devs that liked the coincidentally-nice Apple hardware to complain when Apple's designs drift away from devs' requirements. I don't expect the complaints to change anything, but I expect them to be loud and all over the place for a little while.

overgard• 10 years ago

If apple let you build iOS apps without a mac I wouldn't be so grumpy. As it is apple's choices effect me without there being any recourse, because my development machine has to be a mac (for work, anyway).

msane• 10 years ago

This thing looks terrible.

How did

"Let's add TouchID to the MacBook!"

become

"Let's get rid of escape, power, function keys, volume, brightness, media controls ... and replace it with a second tiny screen!"

ksk• 10 years ago

Has anyone here used the touchbar in person? I'm interested to know how easy it is to touch individual controls on the bar. Like can you be in the middle of typing and hit the keys or do you have to stop and poke at it.

drivingmenuts• 10 years ago

Who wouldn’t want a stock ticker there, or a Twitter feed, or a progress bar for downloads and file operations?

I want function keys there. I have a perfectly good screen to show all that other fluff on.

Apple says no fun allowed on the Touch Bar

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