At least one NLE is making great use of the new Touch Bar

[Bret Williams]

You mean it hides stuff you can’t use at any given point? Yep. For that it’s good. Just like the inspector. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just touch the inspector?

The touch bar may indeed be somewhat useful in certain cases, but I’d rather have a touch screen. It’s kinda hard to not believe they came up with this stop gap measure to put off cannibalizing iPad Pro sales for another year. By the same means I think they’ve put off making iOS a more professional operating system to put off cannibalizing the laptop line.

Or am I stating the obvious?

_______________________________________________________________________
https://BretFX.com FCP X Plugins & Templates for Editors & Motion Graphics Artists

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Richard Herd] “Regarding tactile feedback, I keep meaning to try palletegear.com, and I recall a similar conversation when camera lenses moved to servo motors.

Haptics is the fancy word I learned, but that’s exactly the concept!”

When I think haptic, I think more of vibration feedback that mimics friction. Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbg6Z3CJRnI

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[Bill Davis]

Oh god – I can’t even begin to conceive the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would occur if Apple ever decided that touchscreen computing was the future and stopped putting keyboards on stuff.

The internet would EXPLODE at apocolyptic proportions!

Screams of “AGAIN Apple shows it LOATHS professionals” would ring the planet as pundits weep in disgust and children wake up Christmas AM only to wail in despair at the keyboardless future forced upon them.

There would be roving bands of Rogue touch typists armed with flaming torches and barbed flails converging on Cupertino within minutes of the announcement.

Course if it’s Microsoft with a new Surface –

then it would be just “innovation” cuz…

well – largely cuz they’re not Apple.

Merry Christmas.

; )

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Bill Davis] “Oh god – I can’t even begin to conceive the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would occur if Apple ever decided that touchscreen computing was the future and stopped putting keyboards on stuff. “

Would it be possible for you to address and write about the subject at hand instead of strawmanning each post you write?

-Resolve uses the touch bar
Argument: It’s cool but it looks like it’ll be really slow, but it’ll be better with some changes.
Bill: How about the piano? What about FCPX? WHAT IF EVERYTHING WAS TOUCH SCREENS!

[Richard Herd]

WOW! That is fancy, so clever. I hope the price is competitive enough so it can get in the market.

[Richard Herd]

I understand your point, lol. Touching the inspector is not as great as it seems, however. I’m saying this having used the Surface Book for a while now (granted there isn’t quite the same interface in Win10).

One big silly problem is that the touch screen on a lap top does not have a kickstand, so when you tap the screen the whole thing tilts and jiggles. More often than not, by a wide margin, the taps just don’t register, and often when they do, it jumps into “right click mode.” Urban Armor does a pretty good job with their Surface Pro cases and include a very strong, very stable kickstand. They need to do this with the Surface Book cases.

An additional problem is more ergonomic: my hands are here on the keyboard and here next to the mouse (actually for me, Wacom), but when I want to tap, my arm is no longer supported by stuff and I end up holding my arm in the air, a permanent isometric exercise. There is no way to edit in that position.

Also I bought the Surface Book with the beefed-up GPU (NVIDIA gadget) hoping to improve rendering and such, but it doesn’t. It seems to me, and I leave a wide margin for error here, that the NVIDIA GPU in Surface Book enhances the touch screen capability, and does not add to rendering. I’d be very interested in actual specs here, and I can’t seem to find them. So this is a round about way of saying (and maybe Bill’s lurking), if Apple puts in a touchscreen then I sure hope they don’t decrease rendering ability, ’cause that’d be an uproar for sure.

Another problem is that the “stuff” we tap is pretty tiny, and I’m thinking of the twirls in After Effects for example. Sometimes it registers the tap as “selected layer” when I wanted the twirly, among other problems, and this is the crux of the (potential) revolution in my opinion: the computer can “predict” what input is available based on what I have just done. For example, if I’ve just opened an After Effects project, I have to go through 4 or 5 steps before I can use the commands for adjusting a camera, yet they are in two places before I can even use them. Why is the interface dipslaying input options that are not available — taking up a reasonable amount of screen space, and so here we are back at square one. The tap function is basically a Cartesian Coordinate system, and we tap/click the defined section ON THE SCREEN and everything we could possibly do is all right there all the time ON THE SCREEN.

Whereas, it should be like this: we open our lap tops and the keyboard is totally replaced with an iPad-style touchscreen. If you want to type something, then turn on the keyboard interface device. If you are comfortable doing your job on a keyboard, then the keyboard is still there, but if we want to use a “Super Touchbar” then the whole damn thing could be Contextual; the stuff that’s irrelevant goes away until it’s relevant. In other words, you could line up all your inspectors on the hypothetical iPad-doo-dad I called the Super Touchbar AWAY FROM THE SCREEN.

I personally would like the market to move like that, but I don’t think it will because folks on balance really do not like change.

Here’s an analogy because this forum loves analogies ☺ My uncle is a Mercedes Benz mechanic (retired) and his tool box only contains tools that are in metric.

[Bill Davis]

[Tero Ahlfors] “Would it be possible for you to address and write about the subject at hand instead of strawmanning each post you write?
“

If you think I’m “strawmannirg” – feel free to make your counter-case right here in the thread in response – but I don’t get it. I felt qualified to weigh in on the thread exclusively because I’ve long pointed out a trend I’ve seen in discussions of FCP X and it’s associated tools.

I now think of it as the “Apple New Announcement Ready-Fire-Aim Syndrome.”

No matter WHAT they announce. Get up early so you can hear about why it’s CRAP before anyone else!

I think it’s useful to understand that’s a part of what happens no matter WHAT Apple announces – and if you don’t understand that – it can put an unnecessary barrier between yourself and tools that “might” help your editing.

I was lucky enough to have had near immediate access to the Touch Bar – on a optimized machine – and running software FCP X that I know extremely well. So I had a bit of useful personal experience to use in forming my early opinions about it. Plus that’s surely also colored by the fact that I truly enjoy editing in X – and this device has features to specifically enhance that – so I have a crystal clear bias. One that everybody here knows well and I presume takes into account.

However, I don’t OWN one the the new Touch Bar laptops, so I stopped writing opinions about it – not because I don’t have the opinions – but because I feel the people who USE the tools should be the ones telling other people how they work in the real world.

Sorry that my silly little post has annoyed you so. But pointing out how people tend to look for reasons to hate anything Apple creates (The Touch Bar of the thread topic being the latest and greatest example) – particularly when they haven’t yet really tried the thing they’re talking down – felt germane because it’s a recurring theme I’ve noticed about Apple announcements of the past decade.

That’s all.

Happy New Year.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Bill Davis] “But pointing out how people tend to look for reasons to hate anything Apple creates (The Touch Bar of the thread topic being the latest and greatest example) – particularly when they haven’t yet really tried the thing they’re talking down – felt germane because it’s a recurring theme I’ve noticed about Apple announcements of the past decade.
“

I have a feeling you didn’t read Andrew’s or my posts or we have a different definition of “hate”. Or you haven’t used Resolve at all/enough to know about the issues we expressed.