Thread: 2016 15" Mbp.
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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2017-01-11, 18:01

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
I've stopped watching the keynotes for a while now.
Fair 'nough. I don't watch all of them. Just found this particular topic interesting, and figured at least some regular (does AN still have regulars?) would know this…

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
I did know about the in-app customization, but even that is sadly limited. For example, in Mail.app, I have about 5 folders that 90% of my emails end up going into after they've been handled.

Bills, Work, Home, etc.

You can customize the touch bar in mail, except that your options are pretty limited.

I had hoped I'd be able to add specific mail folders to the bar.
That's unfortunate. I can't really speak from experience yet,** as I can't justify upgrading my MBP after just over two and a half years.*

Quote:
Originally Posted by alcimedes View Post
The control bar is cool, but feels like it wasn't really usability tested, or if it was they didn't follow the bulk of the feedback they would have received from real world users.
Eh, I dunno. It's a 1.0. iOS's Mail couldn't even flag messages until 5.0! Like, at all! That's a pretty amazing limitation in retrospect.

I'm less concerned about how certain useful buttons will eventually get added and more concerned about how good of a control a Touch Bar button is anyway. It's less tactile than a physical key, to be sure. I'd much rather see Apple and third parties explore controls like scrubbers and sliders that take more advantage of visualization and gestures, things that are simply entirely impossible with physical keys. Buttons? Might as well assign, like, F5 to that.

Incidentally, I can't speak to how reliably this works, but you can add custom buttons with BetterTouchTool. I was easily able to add a button that only appears in Mail, and that runs an AppleScript. And then I dusted off the virtually nothing I know about AppleScript, and, well…

Code:
tell application "Mail" set destination to get mailbox "Tickets" of mailbox "Notifications" of account "MyCompany" set msg to get selection move msg to destination end tell
And I selected a message. And I tapped my new button. And the message got moved. Tada.

It's a hack, but it's a start, I guess?

*) Though, increasingly, I run into trying to upgrade a Windows app to better support high-DPI, and virtualizing that does invariably make the fans go screech. It's about the only thing that does… performance is still good for pretty much everything else.

**) I simulate this using Touché, to get a rough sense.
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