Making the Touch Bar useful by abandoning Apple guidelines
&gt; Things got even worse when Apple &quot;reinvented&quot; the Play&#x2F;Pause button in High Sierra.<p>Actually, this was introduced midway through macOS Sierra; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;mediaplayer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;mediaplayer</a> is available in macOS 10.12.1+.<p>&gt; Buttons rock. It&#x27;s always faster to tap, not slide.<p>If you press Fn, the slider will go away and the &quot;normal&quot; function buttons will appear.<p>&gt; I want to have instant access to Finder, anywhere. Default Touch Bar can&#x27;t do that. Weird.<p>Why is this weird? Finder is <i>always</i> in the Dock for every user.<p>&gt; E.g., the eyedropper tool, to take the hex color code from the screen.<p>&#x2F;Application&#x2F;Utilities&#x2F;Digital Color Meter.app<p>&gt; Standard Touch Bar will never support the most useful feature — to display the name of track playing.<p>Slide out Notification Center.<p>&gt; Would be cool to display the name of the YouTube video on the Touch Bar, right?<p>See above.<p>&gt; You have a script running once in 20 seconds, and praying it won&#x27;t overload the CPU.<p>Don&#x27;t do this. Use AppleScript to watch for changes, instead of polling.<p>&gt; I decided to steal this feature and make the &quot;coffee break&quot; button. It locks the laptop and switches the screen off.<p>Press the power button.<p>Not offense, and I&#x27;m sure you enjoy your setup, but I really think it would do you well to learn a bit more about <i>why</i> your computer was designed that way rather than writing a rant online and spending time making it &quot;just right&quot;.<p>EDIT: it looks like this comment is pretty controversial, since it&#x27;s flip-flopping between ±5 points rapidly. Let me give a more detailed response.<p>Personally, I don&#x27;t have a computer with a Touch Bar. I have, however, used one a borrowed one for a couple days. Personally, I would be fine switching (there are other issues with the MacBook Pro that are preventing me, but that&#x27;s a story for another day).<p>I don&#x27;t use the function keys <i>that</i> often, so I don&#x27;t feel as if I&#x27;m &quot;losing out&quot; on them. Many of the supposed grievances that I normally hear are easily solvable (&quot;oh, I didn&#x27;t know I could control the volume slider without lifting my finger&quot;, &quot;I didn&#x27;t know I could add sleep to the Touch Bar&quot;). Really, I think the main issue with the Touch Bar is people view it as a second screen rather than an extra set of controls as it&#x27;s supposed to be. The Touch Bar is meant as a place to have surface extra controls that would be nice to have at your fingertips; what it is <i>not</i> is a place to show you data or be a Dock or menu bar or Notification Center or Activity Monitor. Why? Because you&#x27;re not always looking down at it. There&#x27;s no point putting any significant information there.<p>That being said, Touch Bar is not perfect, of course. It&#x27;s a nice idea, but it could be improved if it provided more tactile feedback (e.g. haptic feedback, some sort of dynamic change in texture). And given that it&#x27;s new, Apple&#x27;s guidelines, while good, may end up changing as real-world usage influences them. Overall, though, I feel that much of the Touch Bar criticism is based on knee-jerk reactions or issues that are not difficult to resolve. Yes, there are some  deeper issues, as I&#x27;ve outlined above, but I think the concept as a whole is interesting.