“Forget about the argument about whether the Touch Bar is really a feature that can appeal to professionals. I’ll just accept that it can be, based on the demonstrations at the Apple media event that focused on Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro X,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “The fact that developers are busy adding support to their own apps indicates they have confidence that Apple is pointing the way to a useful addition in personal computing.”
“Indeed I wonder just what’s going to happen now that the MacBook Air is reduced to a single model that’s smacks of a closeout,” Steinberg writes. “I suppose that the MacBook might come down in price as a replacement, but what about expanding Touch Bar support?”
“Apple didn’t invent the Touch Bar with the plan to restrict it to a single model. There’s a long-range plan, and adding it to a MacBook or some future Mac notebook is only part of the picture,” Steinberg writes. “I expect that a future keyboard, perhaps a Magic Keyboard 2 with Touch Bar, will deliver the feature for Mac desktops. But it won’t come cheap.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Next to go should be the rest of the keyboard. All keys, not just the function row, should be accessible to developers.
The problem is… these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons, just for it. And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can’t run around and add a button to these things. They’re already shipped… It doesn’t work because the buttons and the controls can’t change. They can’t change for each application, and they can’t change down the road if you think of another great idea you wanna add to this product. Well, how do you solve this? Hmm. It turns out, we have solved it! — Steve Jobs, unveiling the iPhone, January 9, 2007
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