Make your own Touch Bar

Discover benefits of Apple’s input innovation and turn your iPad into one

Apple’s Touch Bar technology puts context-sensitive controls at the top of the keyboard in the hope of saving you time digging around in menus and windows to

find the commands you need. Currently, the only official way to get a Touch Bar is to buy a MacBook Pro, and even if Apple were to update its Bluetooth-connected Magic Keyboard to include one, it’s unlikely to be affordable given the existing model costs £99.

However, you can add a Touch Bar to your existing Mac by adding an iPad and third-party software into the mix. If you don’t have an iPad there’s a Mac app that enables you to see what the Mac’s latest control method would add to your apps if you were to upgrade.

Be aware, though, that there’s one aspect of the real thing that you can’t replicate using the following methods: a Touch ID sensor for unlocking your Mac, validating payments online, waking your Mac, and more. (A real Touch Bar has a combined Touch ID sensor and power button at its right end.) That said, there are other ways to imitate some of the sensor’s benefits; MacID (£3.99, macid.co) enables you to unlock your Mac using the Touch ID sensor on your iPhone or iPad.

However, the bigger bonus of having a Touch Bar to hand is the range of time-saving shortcuts it provides in apps bundled with macOS, as well as a growing number of thirdparty ones, which includes OmniGraffle 7, 1Password and Mail Designer Pro 3.

If you have a Mac with a built-in Touch Bar, don’t assume these pages are irrelevant to you; whether you’re using the real deal or an iPad as a stand-in, you’ll find tips later on in this tutorial on how to tailor the bar’s contents and ensure you’re getting the most from it.

Try it out for free

Any Mac that’s running macOS Sierra 10.12.2 or higher is silently generating the content that would be displayed on a Touch Bar if one were present, it just doesn’t have anywhere to show it. Also, macOS knows how that content should behave if you had a way to interact

Even if you have a proper Touch Bar, read on for tips on getting the most from it

with it – which you can, thanks to a couple of third-party tools that use that internal model to mimic a real Touch Bar on other Macs.

The quickest way to see what a Touch Bar would offer you is Touché, a free utility from Red Sweater Software that renders macOS’s internal model of the bar in a window. The app isn’t simply a dumb display of that content, though; where you would tap or swipe controls on a real Touch Bar, you can click or drag them on Touché’s window to get the same effects. This doesn’t give you a true feel for the real thing, of course, but it’s a good way to investigate the shortcuts your favourite apps would provide, given the right hardware.

Get Touché from red-sweater.com/touche, unpack the archive, move the app to the Applications folder, then open it. You can place Touché’s window where you want – near the bottom of the primary display is probably best.

When Touché is running, macOS will reveal customisation options for the Touch Bar in System Preferences and compatible apps, which we’ll discuss later.

The better (but paid) option

For an experience closer to a real Touch Bar, you’ll need an iPad and its USB cable, and Duet Display (£19.99, duetdisplay.com). We’ve talked about this app before (notably in MF298, where we discussed its primary purpose of extending a Mac’s desktop onto an iOS device.

Duet 1.6.3.4 for Mac and 1.3.7 for iOS enable the app to render the Touch Bar at the bottom of your iPad’s screen, covering up a little strip across the bottom of the extended desktop. With your iPad propped up behind your keyboard – ideally a low-profile one, such as the Magic Keyboard – you end up with a rough but usable approximation of a real Touch Bar. Depending on the arrangement of your desk – say, if your primary display is raised high enough that your iPad doesn’t obscure your view of it – this has the added advantage of giving you more space on which to stash apps you glance at only occasionally.

Customise your Touch Bar

By default, the Touch Bar displays contextual app controls on its left side and across most of its width, and a shortened Control Strip of system-wide controls towards its right end. Tapping the arrow at the left of the Control Strip expands it temporarily, filling the bar with additional items that appear in the top row of a regular Mac keyboard; you won’t need these with Touché or Duet Display because you already have real keys for this function, but you can change the Control Strip’s contents to include other shortcuts that

usually require multi-key combinations, which you may have trouble remembering; we particularly like the single-key shortcuts for locking the screen, putting our Mac to sleep, and taking a screenshot. The latter of these even offers the ability to open screenshots in Preview immediately, or to file them in the Documents folder instead of on the Desktop.

In the walkthrough below, you’ll learn how to customise what your Touch Bar displays by default and when you hold down ƒ, and how to alter the Control Strip’s contents. You can tailor the Touch Bar in more ways, too; some apps that support it enable you to pick which of their controls are pinned to it. So, in Safari you can add controls to add a bookmark, open the Share menu so you can use the arrow keys to choose from it rather than having to reach for your mouse or trackpad, or view the current page in Reader mode. Look for a Customize Touch Bar item in an app’s View menu. While customising the bar, note the ‘Show typing suggestions’ checkbox; clear it if you don’t want predictive text suggestions, like those on an iPhone, to appear in the bar.

There’s one thing to beware of when using Duet Display: on a Mac that had a secondary display already, we found Duet’s Touch Bar would was sometimes blank. Disconnecting the existing secondary display resolved this, so you should find Duet works fine if your Mac currently has one display.