Do you Believe in Magic?
Thoughts on the “Magic Toolbar”
Today an image of the long-anticipated MacBook Pro leaked, showing a redesigned keyboard. Most notable was the replacement of the function row with what is presumably an OLED screen. The use case shown is for Apple Pay with TouchID.
This makes perfect sense, as a specific interface for this kind of authentication, near the actual TouchID button, is more clear. Of course, Apple could show such a pointer on the bottom right of the laptop’s main screen, but this seems more appropriate considering disparate sizes and layouts of windows, compared to the more integrated experience of iOS.
There are a number of other reasons to switch to more of a “soft” keyboard in this area. Over the years, Apple has been changing this row up more than any other part of the keyboard, due to changes in software features such as Exposé.
Over time, the function keys themselves were eventually relegated to a secondary position, with Dashboard, Launchpad, and various controls taking the primary spot. In the drive for visual simplicity, for product screenshots as well as in-store looks, it also makes sense, considering Apple’s design tastes, to remove these extraneous functions from being front and center. But there’s more to it.
For instance, look at the two sets of brightness keys on the current (2015) MacBook function row — one set for display brightness, one for keyboard backlight brightness. For the volume, there’s actually three — one for mute and the other two for up and down. That’s three hardware keyboard buttons for essentially one, well, function. A simpler layout could use a single software volume button with a visual slider that appears as needed. Tapping then gesturing left or right could adjust volume in one fell swoop; simply tapping it once could display a larger interface, potentially with greater control such as displaying audio output options (as is done in the status menu).
Which begs the question — could this new input option replace or augment the status menu entirely? This is one part of macOS that I find a bit messy. As a creative professional on a 15" MacBook Pro, my status menu is often clipped.
If we’re removing four or so somewhat redundant buttons, such as these brightness and volume toggles, we’ve got extra real estate to work with. A dedicated Siri button could be added. An AirPlay menu could work nicely in the Magic Toolbar area, not to mention, a greater flexibility in media playback options (play pause as well as finer grained control such as a playback slider, shuffle, and so on). The wifi status bar menu could be a bit much if it were to include a list of open networks, but it could certainly work. The battery indicator makes a lot of sense placed on the toolbar, as it could show its status even if the screen is not on. Date and time or user options may be pushing it, but user accounts make some sense placed here, considering that TouchID would be the way to authenticate them, and the TouchID button is built right in.
Considering how Control Center works on iOS, a software input bar starts to click. The new Dark-mode for macOS could have a toggle placed more front and center than its hidden option in Settings, similar to iOS’s Night Shift mode. HomeKit buttons could be added as well, for those who would find such a thing useful (and I’m one of them). In short, this strip could be much more flexible, even without letting the user decide what to place there. If it’s opened up to developers and customizable, all the more.
For textual input, some interesting cases could be made for more contextually-aware features. For iOS, the Predictive text bar is an option. On macOS, this doesn’t exist. MacOS does provide overlay options such as additional characters and spelling replacements. I’m not sure it would be worth the visual disruption on a separate screen, but a Predictive text list could certainly be a useful feature, especially in regards to accessibility. A clearer, more common use case could simply be an emoji list, with the OLED color display working quite well.
While the current implementation of spelling suggestions and character choices is navigable with only the keyboard, having these be clickable, “typable” buttons could be clearer to understand. Haptic feedback for this input strip would be essential, I think, and I would wager that it will have its own custom “Taptic engine”.
I expect at some point for the entire keyboard to be either individual OLED or e-ink displays for complete customization and clarity. A core experience on macOS is holding down the Option or Command buttons to change keyboard shortcuts. Actually displaying such functionality would be beneficial. For instance, holding down the Command key could show a copy or paste icon on the C or V keys, respectively. I don’t expect this in Thursday’s announcement, but the Magic Toolbar is a step in that direction. It’ll put the “fun” in Fn.
