How to use the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro

How to use the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro

When Apple updated the MacBook Pro in 2016 foremost among its list of upgrades and new features was something called the Touch Bar, a thintouchscreen display sitting along the top of the keyboard in place of the function keys. The company has since launched updated MacBook Pro models for 2017 (covered here: and ), and these retain the feature. In this article we show how to use the Touch Bar on these MacBook Pro models: including how its functions change for various commonly used apps, and how to customise the Touch Barso it displays and performs exactly the functions you want. The Touch Bar is only available on certain models of the 15-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2016 and 2017. These include these current 2017 models, which you can . And these 2016 models, which you may find secondhand or on Read next: | There are lots of ways in which the Touch Bar can simplify tasks you frequently do on your Mac. One of our favourites is the ease at which we can correct spelling mistakes, just by tapping on the correct word. Find out some of the things you can do with the Touch Bar below, including some features that it brings to specific apps. We would love it if we could add favourite apps to the Touch Bar, or have the Touch Bar mirror the Dock, but as yet it isnt possible. If you tap the smiley face in Mail (or in Messages, for that matter), Touch Bar transforms into a swipeable menu ofemoji: most frequently used, by default, but you can tap the button on the left to select a different menu of images. Tap the emoji you want to include in your message. The Touch Bar replaces the row of Function keys, but don't worry: it's easy to bring them back. By default, the Fn button brings up the Function keys on the Touch Bar. However:if you open the keyboard section of System Preferences and explore the options related to the Touch Bar, you'll see that you can customise what the Fnbutton does. Jump to the section where we if you want to change what the Fn button does to the Touch Bar. This depends on which app you're using. In most of the main apps Esc is present on the far left; this includes Photos, Mail, Safari and Keynote. If the app you're using doesn't include Esc, check the customisation palette and see if it's available to add so that it shows up in that app in future. At any time, too, you can click somewhere on the desktop and the Touch Bar will revert to its standard default layout, which includes Esc. It's also possible to reassign one of the hardware keys to act as Escape on a system-wide level. Read more: If you use Tags to make it easier to find documents you can easily add them using the Touch Bar The Touch Bar's default function set in Safari features back and forward buttons, a 'new tab' button and a set of thumbnails showing the tabs you currently have open it's very easy to switch between open tabs by swiping across this section of the bar. An eagle-eyed had spotted an additional function of the Touch Bar in Safari. He wrote: In Safari, the [Touch Bar]will pop up a scrubbing control whenever a video begins to play, writes RomansFiveEight. Amazingly, you can use that to scrub THROUGH an ad, even a non-skippable 30 second pre-roll ad; and begin your video right away! Unfortunately this feature didn't survive for long, currently the scrubbing feature, that lets you move through the content quickly, is missing from YouTube. Read more: Mail is a really strong example of the Touch Bar's power, essentially bringing the convenience of iOS's predictive keyboard to Mac. As on iPhone, suggested words and emoji appear just above the keyboard, enabling you to rattle out emails more quickly. There's also, inevitably, an emoji button. Your ability to 'delete' depends a little on your email settings and the email service you use. However, you should be able to delete (or at least archive emails) by following the following directions. You can customise the Touch Bar in some Apple apps, including Mail and Safari Photo's default feature set is dominated by a swipeable gallery of image thumbnails: handy for rapidly jumping to the image you want to work on. Like Safari, Photos also includes the volume and Siri buttons at the right. On the left there are some interesting buttons, including a button to Like an image in your library and an edit key: tap this and the Touch Bar changes entirely. Now you've got crop, auto edit and other editing functions. Our favourite is the rotation tool in the centre: swipe this to rotate the image to your preference. Tap Done to go back to the default Photos Touch Bar layout. There are Touch Bar controls for Play, Pause, as well as Rewind and Fast Forward these can be used in movie playback as well as for music As with iTunes, you can use the Touch Bar to scrub through video for easier editing The default App Controls for Apple Maps are very simple. You just get icons for restaurants, cafes, shops and cinemas: tap one of these and Maps will run a search for nearby businesses answering that description. Once you get stuck into Maps, however, the Touch Bar becomes far more interesting. Select any of the businesses found in that initial search, for instance, and you get a button to bring up directions to it, as well further controls to go to the firm's website, call (don't worry a further confirmation is required before the call is actually placed through FaceTime audio, so you're unlikely to call by accident), favourite (or unfavourite) it, get more information and (very usefully) send the details toa contact. You can sort of change the Touch Bar controls in Notes, but currently there aren't any additional controls to add so all you'll be doing is moving the controls around, removing ones you don't like (you can turn off typing suggestions here), or adding spaces between them. How to check appointments in your Calendar using the Touch Bar It's sort of possible to initiate FaceTime calls from the Touch Bar, but you have to set it up so the correct contact is displayed there. As long as you have previously called that person from FaceTime on your Mac you can start a call from the Touch Bar. It's pleasingly intuitive to customise the functions that appear in the Touch Bar. In fact, it operates essentially like the Dock in macOS or iOS you just drag functions down to it and they'll appear there instantly. Bear in mind, however, that this is done on an app-by-app basis, and Apple says only that some apps allow you to customise the way Touch Bar works. First of all, let's look at some global settings and preferences for the Touch Bar. Open System Preferences then open the Keyboard section. Make sure you're in the Keyboard pane the word Keyboard on the left should be highlighted in blue. You'll see two dropdown option menus in the centre which relate to the Touch Bar: 'Touch Bar shows' and 'Press Fn key to'. In the firstof these dropdowns, 'Touch Bar shows', you get to decide on a global level whether the Touch Bar will show just App Controls (the functions specific to the application you're using), just an Expanded Control Strip (brightness and volume controls, media buttons and the like), or the default choice a mixture of the two. The lower of thetwo Touch Bar-related dropdown menus in System Preferences > Keyboard, 'Press Fn key to', selects what the Fn key will do to the Touch Bar. The default here is to bring up the Function keys, but if you selected 'App Controls' or 'App Controls with Control Strip' in the menu above, you can make the Fn key show or expand the Control Strip. And if you selected 'Expanded Control Strip', you can make the Fn key show the app-specific controls. I've made that sound complicated. Basically, the Fn key can be made to display either the Function keys, or whichever Touch Bar element you didn't pick as the default. Now let's look at how to customise the controls and icons that the Touch Bar displays for each application. Selectedapps willlet you bring up a palette of functions onscreen and you do this within the app itself, not in System Preferences. Open Finder, for instance, then select View > Customise Touch Bar, and you'll see the options below. All you need to do is click-and-drag your chosen function down to the bottom of the screen, whereupon it will appear in the Touch Bar. The existing controls will wobble very slightly to indicate their are open to editing just like app icons in iOS when you're moving apps around. To change the Touch Bar controls in other apps, open each app in turn and find the option to customise the Touch Bar. It won't necessarily be located in the same section of the menu as in Finder, but looking underView, or in the app's preferences, would bea good place to start. Remember, however, that not all apps allow Touch Bar customisation. Bear in mind, finally, that you need to make sure your chosen app is displaying the default Touch Bar controls at the moment you select the customisation option, and hasn't switched to some other set of controls because of an unusual context; otherwise you'll just customise the controls for that context, not for general use of that app. We tried to customise Touch Bar in Safari, for instance more on that in a moment but initially made the mistake of doing this while open on a tab running Gmail with a new email currently being composed. So the Touch Bar was displaying QuickType suggestions, emoji and things like that, rather than the normal Safari controls. And when we opened the customisation menu, it tried to change controls. At the 2017Pwn2Own hacking contest, two participants namedSamuel Gro and Niklas Baumstark were able to on a MacBook Pro and make it display the following witty message: We understand thatGro and Baumstark were able to access the display through a flaw in Safari which allowed them to gain root control of macOS. It probably isn't worth worrying about any hacker who has access to your Macand the skills which would let them break into the Touch Bar can do a lot more damage than displaying a funny message, and Apple will plug the flaw ina software update but it's an interesting and impressive demonstration.