[Richard Herd]

[Bret Williams] “they’ve enhanced function with a visible function you wouldn’t think of or wouldn’t usually learn”

This raises a cool issue (ok maybe not cool but at least nerdy): knowledge, acquisition v learning. It’s easy enough to google for detailed explanations, but the touchbar solves a fancy problem because it hides all the stuff you don’t need. It constrains the number of cases, whereas a keyboard has all the shortcuts all the time and the combinations are crazy complicated and that makes them really hard to get into your head and hands. As a species we do really well with inductive knowledge acquisition when there are constraints on the number of cases we generalize from. Long story short: holy crap it’s hard to acquire keyboard shortcuts, and so instead we have to learn them — usually by looking it up in a technical manual and or website — or by asking the creativecow.

For me, the touchbar as input device is a revolution (in that Thomas Kuhn way). I hope it catches on.

[Richard Herd]

[Walter Soyka] “Flame UI is highly contextual”

I’ll have to look up some videos, since I don’t use Flame — though I’d like to.

[Richard Herd]

I will attempt to make the point ad nauseam: the difference between touchscreen and touchbar is the contextualizing. It’s an important difference, imo. Touchscreen is just a mousey thing in general, what is on the screen is on the screen and you tap it, click, Wacom it — even if it was really fancy and followed your eye movement, it’s still Cartesian X,Y stuffs. Contextualizing is much different.

In After Effects, select a layer and it displays changes to the interface-display: click down the twirly and the display changes, and so on.

Contextualizing is different because the interface device (touchbar in this case but not necessarily) itself transforms based on what the display is doing also. After Effects (and Adobe really) sort of break down here because they have done such a fantastic job of making GUI inside GUI inside GUI inside GUI … it’s turtles all the way down. LOL. So at this moment, After Effects interface is hard to describe contextually. “I shall try nonetheless,” he said with his finger pointing at the falling sky.

Even though I am setting a keyframe for scale, ALL of the other commands (even the ones that won’t work) are right there on the keyboard (like CTRL+ALT+Shift+\ and it takes me two hands to execute.

Contextual is the name for the idea that, when I am setting keyframes for scale ALT-SHIFT-S, the command for setting a keyframe for Opacity (ALT-SHIFT-T) should disappear, and other commands should show up: CTRL-ALT-+. So the question is:

Why is the input-device showing the stuff I’m not using (in fact it’s showing everything!) and not pointing out the next command. Here’s a silly example: Launch After Effects, CONTROL-N, [enter], CTRL-Y, [enter], ALT-SHIFT-T, ALT-SHIFT-J, 15, ENTER, CTRL-SHIFT-O, 0, ENTER.

In practice, I find it much more efficient to use my Wacom with touch-on, at my right hand, and the keyboard on my left. I tried using the touch screen to replace the wacom but the problem was ergonomic, my right hand was not resting on anything and my shoulder started to hurt. Wimpy video nerd that I am.

I said all that to repeat myself: touchscreen mousy stuff is different than Contextualizing. IMO, we should demand much more from the touchbar than simply it being mousy-stuff. So, in AE, I should be able to program it/customize it so that when I hit “T” (for opacity) the touchbar shows the icons representing ALT-SHIFT-T etc. mentioned above. Then when I hit “S,” the touchbar switches to the stuff for Scale.

But wait, why even have a keyboard?

[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!

[Richard Herd]

Adobe did well with “tablet mode” also especially in Illustrator (haven’t tried AE but that’s because I need lots of monitor real estate [but maybe I don’t…hmm]) when I’m actually using the pen. They far outpace “palm muting” compared to Wacom.

I’ll have to check out OneNote for real. THanks!

[Richard Herd]

[Herb Sevush] “If you really like “touch” interfaces you should try Microsoft – not only a touch “bar” but you can touch the entire screen. “

I’ve been using the Surface Book with Creative Cloud for about 10 months now, and in effect it’s still a mouse because tapping the screen is what a mouse does, only now it’s your finger, and all the little dropdown twirlys in After Effects for example are very tiny and they are hard to “tap.” It’s still much mo’ bettuh to use the short cut keyboard commands.

The touchbar appears to be a different concept altogether because it’s (at least in theory) contextual. For me, the question is, will we be able to customize the contextual-ness (aka mapping shortcuts).

[Richard Herd]

[Bill Davis] “Apple is taking their time to THINK ABOUT how to best program for it “

However, IMO, I do not believe Apple is necessarily thinking about it as much as they are waiting for actual user feedback–which is a very good thing, so here’s mine: why do we need a keyboard? It’s really just an “app” type of thing. Screen/monitor here, and a flexible input device doo-dad there — or maybe better than that, where we “program” how much screen real estate is monitor and how much is input device — like the messaging app interface.

However, as always, I believe price point is a real concern. Those little screens as input device are expensive. So as a comparison, put your iPhone 7 on top of the keyboard — who needs a keyboard (except when posting here of course)? — imagine that as the input device.

[Richard Herd]

https://freelanceboost.com/freelance-hourly-rate-calculator/

[Richard Herd]

[Mark Suszko] “an overall form-factor issue.”

They look really cool.

[Richard Herd]

Hahahahahahahahahahaha! Haven’t seen that in years!