Sunday, October 30, 2016

Apple’s Touch Bar on Macbook Pro and Word Perfect 5.1 and Vim Editor commands

As you already know Apple released a touch bar for their Macbook Pro laptops. I will analyze this from a different angle and see how professional content creators could leverage this with a bit of flavor from developers’ selection of editing tool.
I am talking about Word Perfect 5.1 and its keyboard template that we all used to have back in the day. Apple’s touch bar reminds me of Word Perfect 5.1 and the ability to have context relevant shortcuts. Apple just took it to the 21st century and made the context relevant shortcuts for all the majro applications that run on Macbook Pro. They are taking their innovations for usability and accessibility in one direction that is different from the touch screen direction that others are betting on. This is going to be interesting.
I gave it a bit more thought coming from the software engineering background. I don’t necessarily use native Vim editor often, but I do use the Vim plug-in for my IDEs and for text editors that I use for note-taking purposes. The Vim mode improves my productivity and it keeps my fingers on the keyboard.
I wonder if there is a way to leverage the touch bar interface more as a proxy between the keyboard and the Mac OS applications so that Vim-style of shortcuts could be used to control the applications without reaching for the touch bar. This could be something that professional content creators may use in order to speed up their interactions and keep the fingers on the keyword all the time instead of reaching out for the touch bar or the touch screen. Let’s say you are in your Final Cut Pro application and instead of using the touch bar as they have shown in the demo, you use Vim plug in the Final Cut Pro application that would leverage the touch bar as the proxy between the keyboard and the application.
I know this would be a super niche market, but I still wanted to share with you.

Almir M.
(Solutions Architect and Leader in Software Engineering field)

No comments:

Post a Comment