Make your own Touch Bar
Discover benefits of Apple’s input innovation and transform your iPad
REQUIRES
An iPad with iOS 7 or later, a Mac with OS X 10.9 or later, Duet Display
you will learn
How to see what a real Touch Bar would offer you, and how to use your iPad as one
IT WILL TAKE
20 minutes
Apple’s Touch Bar
technology puts context-sensitive controls at the top of the keyboard, to save 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 an 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, 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 third-party 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 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 with it – which you can, thanks to a couple of third-party tools that use that internal model to mimic a real Touch Bar.
The quickest way to see what a Touch Bar would offer you is Touché, a free utility from Red Sweater Software ( red
sweater.com/touche) 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 favorite apps would provide, if they were given the right hardware.
Get Touché, 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 customization options for the Touch Bar in System Preferences and compatible apps, which we’ll discuss later in the tutorial. The better (but paid) option For an experience closer to a real Touch Bar, you’ll need an iPad, its USB cable, and Duet Display ($20, duetdisplay.com). We’ve talked about this app before, when we discussed its main purpose: extending a Mac’s desktop onto an iOS device.
Duet for Mac and 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 lowprofile 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. Customize 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 purpose, 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.
For instance, we particularly like the single-key shortcuts for locking the screen, putting the Mac to sleep, or 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, which is useful.
In the walkthrough below, you’ll learn how to customize what your Touch Bar displays by default and when you hold 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 customizing 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 already had a secondary display, we found Duet’s Touch Bar would sometimes appear blank. Disconnecting the existing secondary display resolved this, so you should find Duet works fine if your Mac currently has just the one display.