The Apple MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar turns into a “hand-me-down” taskbar with a little help from iOS
Curious about how the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar would work on any “old”, or current Mac laptop or desktop?
Robbert Klarenback’s Touch Bar Demo App, available on GitHub, may provide an insight into what it means to use the brand new feature on any Mac.
It goes without saying that the hack comes with a number of provisions, but ultimately it works rather well, by enabling to control the desktop and apps on any MacBook, iMac, Mac Pro or Mac Mini, using an iPad’s touchscreen as a remote Touch Bar display.
One caveat is that the Mac controlled by the app must run macOS Sierra version 10.12.1, build 16B2657, or newer, which is easy enough to come by through Apple. Another caveat is that the Mac computer needs to have a copy of Xcode installed, since the app requires it to enable an iPad to connect to a Mac, and control it remotely.
The actual application must be sideloaded using Xcode, which it goes without saying that the instructions are not for the uninitiated.
The end result, as mentioned earlier, is for the app to display an interactive representation of the Apple Touch Bar on an iPad’s screen, which, if configured correctly, will display controls according to the application selected in macOS.
As the video shows, the experiment works well enough to illustrate how a Touch Bar would work with devices other than the new MacBook Pro, which also includes the entry level 13 inch MacBook Pro with the physical function keys row.
In regard to the practical application of this hack, there is little chance that it will catch on among regular consumers, in light of the difficulty of implementing a feature that makes sense only within the context of having an actual Touch Bar available.
While the feature is perfectly functional, the app works by taking over the entire screen of an iPad rather than just the bottom part of a full-size touchscreen.
Watching the app in action brings up also a good point on why the MacBook isn’t likely to get a main touchscreen display, or any kind of iPad/Mac-convergent features. The novelty of the Touch Bar’s design is very much centered as a side-feature, enabling interactivity with fullscreen apps, without a complex and cluttered interface. Image processing apps, like Photoshop for example, can finally benefit from off-screen controls that allow to manipulate an image in compact or full screen view. Multimedia controls, for video and audio can now be accessible on the Touch Bar rather than overlaid on the video itself.
There are virtually limitless applications for the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, but none of them would work on anything but the actual Touch Bar itself, as it is intended.
Apple’s design is perhaps the first implemented by the company, after other manufacturers attempted at different implementations of a peripheral control interacting with a host operating system, many of them typical of gaming keyboards and accessories.
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