Everybody’s talking about the new Apple MacBook Pros and their Touch Bar OLED touch strip, that lets you access a variety of shortcuts and app sub menus. Now Apple has opened up that portion of the device to developers, but with pretty strict guidelines.
So, it appears that the leftmost area is clearly reserved to the Escape button, while the middle and left portion are all for the apps and the right bit is meant as the control strip. Apple highlights in the official documents that the Touch Bar is strictly an input device, not a display. It’s not allowed to show alerts, messages, scrolling content, or static content, so it won’t distract the user.
The developers are advised to “strive to match the look of the physical keyboard”, while creating menus for the Touch Bar. They’re also advised to avoid showing commands already available on the keyboard. I for one imagined that we’d be able to show something like portions of a game’s menu, the music player, bits of the video playback interface and more.
One would even show his cool gamer tag to friends during a competition, or maybe his Facebook Cover or YouTube Cover, let’s say. Apple is being strict about this, but hackers will have their way probably…
