March 6, 2019

When I replaced a dead MacBook Pro a couple of years ago I bought the, then new, top of the range model with the TouchBar. At the time I was exited to see how Apple and third-party developers used this new interface to enhance the user interfaces to take advantage of its control strip.

The answer turned out to be that no-one did anything much with it and it was a huge waste of money that I regret paying a premium price for! Very few applications use Touch Bar capabilities imaginatively and Apple have locked-down access to it so tightly that it actually makes utility apps such as Keyboard Maestro less useful. Where I used to hit F1, F2, F3 etc. for shortcuts I now have to modify them with the key so they fell out of use.

The only real advantage was that it adds TouchID and that opens up Apple Pay.

This week I installed and registered Better Touch Tool to restore some of that lost functionality. Even with just a few new buttons created I can start to see how I can take advantage of the Touch Bar to customise applications in the same way that I use Keyboard Maestro to make keyboard shortcuts more powerful.

It’s early days but it will be interesting to see how my use of this evolves.

Software


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