Vidrio needs the touch bar

Vidrio has an opacity slider in the menu bar. This is rather annoying for presentations, since you don’t want to fiddle with a menu bar in the middle of your presentation! Because of this, I implemented global keyboard shortcuts (still undocumented - needs accessibility features). But keyboard shortcuts are bad for discoverability, and the Touch Bar provides a much better solution.

The Touch bar has three sections: a system button on the left (usually “Esc”), an app-specific section in the middle (most of the bar), and the “control strip” on the right which contains icons for each app which is registered on the Touch bar. For example, I can hit the “brightness” icon in the control strip, which makes a brightness slider appear in the app-specific section. After using the slider, the Touch Bar goes back to just showing the control strip and system button. The “volume” slider works in the same way.

Vidrio’s Touch Bar feature should be the same as the “brightness” and “volume” sliders. The user hits the Vidrio icon in the control strip, which makes the opacity slider appear in the app-specific section. After adjusting the opacity slider, the Touch Bar goes back to showing the control strip.

I’ll be developing it this week.


I wrote this because I'm making Vidrio this month. I also just got my new MacBook Pro with the touch bar. Merge. This post is my own, and not associated with my employer.

Jim. Public speaking. Friends. Vidrio.