<story><title>Images of New MacBook Pro with Magic Toolbar Leaked in MacOS Sierra 10.12.1</title><url>http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/25/images-of-new-macbook-pro-leaked/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>Yes, I touch-type function keys.  And having used the X1 Carbon 2nd generation, I &lt;i&gt;hated&lt;/i&gt; the &amp;quot;touch-strip&amp;quot; function keys, both because they have no boundaries between keys and because they have no tactile feedback when pressing.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;context bar&amp;quot; seems like a huge win for people who look at the keyboard (who do comprise a huge fraction of the market), and a huge loss for touch-typists.&lt;p&gt;That said, I also don&amp;#x27;t use that many function keys, and I&amp;#x27;ve slowly started remapping the keys I care about to other key combinations.  In practice, I care about a few sets of function keys, most notably F11&amp;#x2F;F12 (commonly used for fullscreen, which I&amp;#x27;ve now remapped to Super-F), and F4 (Alt-F4 to close applications, for which I&amp;#x27;ve now trained my fingers to use Ctrl-W or Ctrl-Q and report bugs on the occasional application that doesn&amp;#x27;t accept those).</text></item><item><author>hn_user2</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m really surprised by the negative reactions to the context bar. Does everyone really have memorized what all 12 function keys do in every app they use? I think this could tremendously help usability for pretty much every application other than my IDE, since I do have those memorized.&lt;p&gt;Being able to hit a function key without looking? I may be able to to touch type. But I&amp;#x27;ve never trusted myself to hit a function key blindly.&lt;p&gt;I will say. Stepping through code could be difficult. Where I repeatedly am stepping over lines while looking at the screen. I imagine my finger could drift. Couldn&amp;#x27;t say without using it, but I imagine I would keep one finger on a number to ground my hand while tapping step over or step in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lathiat</author><text>I have the same keyboard and same problem.   I am desperately hoping that Apple is (a) using some taptic magic to make it easy to feel the edges between keys (this is possible from the original haptic&amp;#x2F;taptic research) and (b) requires a CLICK instead of a TOUCH to reduce accidental touches.  A physical escape key wouldn&amp;#x27;t have gone astray either, as a power terminal user particularly with vim -- different escape keys (no matter how good or bad, simply being different in tactility) also drive me a bit batty.</text></comment>
<story><title>Images of New MacBook Pro with Magic Toolbar Leaked in MacOS Sierra 10.12.1</title><url>http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/25/images-of-new-macbook-pro-leaked/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>Yes, I touch-type function keys.  And having used the X1 Carbon 2nd generation, I &lt;i&gt;hated&lt;/i&gt; the &amp;quot;touch-strip&amp;quot; function keys, both because they have no boundaries between keys and because they have no tactile feedback when pressing.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;context bar&amp;quot; seems like a huge win for people who look at the keyboard (who do comprise a huge fraction of the market), and a huge loss for touch-typists.&lt;p&gt;That said, I also don&amp;#x27;t use that many function keys, and I&amp;#x27;ve slowly started remapping the keys I care about to other key combinations.  In practice, I care about a few sets of function keys, most notably F11&amp;#x2F;F12 (commonly used for fullscreen, which I&amp;#x27;ve now remapped to Super-F), and F4 (Alt-F4 to close applications, for which I&amp;#x27;ve now trained my fingers to use Ctrl-W or Ctrl-Q and report bugs on the occasional application that doesn&amp;#x27;t accept those).</text></item><item><author>hn_user2</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m really surprised by the negative reactions to the context bar. Does everyone really have memorized what all 12 function keys do in every app they use? I think this could tremendously help usability for pretty much every application other than my IDE, since I do have those memorized.&lt;p&gt;Being able to hit a function key without looking? I may be able to to touch type. But I&amp;#x27;ve never trusted myself to hit a function key blindly.&lt;p&gt;I will say. Stepping through code could be difficult. Where I repeatedly am stepping over lines while looking at the screen. I imagine my finger could drift. Couldn&amp;#x27;t say without using it, but I imagine I would keep one finger on a number to ground my hand while tapping step over or step in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duckfruit</author><text>I have an X1 Carbon from work. Overall an OK windows laptop, but man does the eink(?) touch strip thing suck. While I think that the Macbook version will be far superior, I hope they manage to solve its glaring shortcomings. Some observations:&lt;p&gt;1. Questionable utility. Sure, there&amp;#x27;s an icon for &amp;#x27;copy&amp;#x27; and &amp;#x27;paste&amp;#x27;, but I cannot imagine it being easier for anyone to hunt along a non tactile touch surface located in an awkward position to hit that icon rather than just using Ctrl + C (or the mouse, which you&amp;#x27;ve just made your selection with). That&amp;#x27;s a shortcut almost everyone knows.&lt;p&gt;2. Poor&amp;#x2F;Non-existent third party software support. Basically works for IE and Windows Explorer and that&amp;#x27;s it.&lt;p&gt;3. Software that drives the screen is poorly made and crashes occasionally.&lt;p&gt;4. The strip is a 2 bit&amp;#x2F;pixel B&amp;amp;W screen that is hard to read and is not backlit.</text></comment>