MacBook Pro TouchBar Plans?

There has not been any official word that I recall hearing.

I got really excited about that idea too when I first heard about the TouchBar, but I never really gave it much thought. Let's think about it! This'll be fun!

It'd be really nice to have a quick slider for zooming in and out of the timeline! Although, the keys to do that are right there by the touchbar area anyway, so it really wouldn't help much. Never mind.

Changing values with a slider on the TouchBar could be handy. Hmmm. Say I have a keyframe for opacity selected, but my CTI is not parked on that keyframe. If the TouchBar shows an opacity slider, is it changing the opacity for the keyframe I have selected or adding a new keyframe at the point of the CTI with the new value?

And, if it changes the value of the selected keyframe (the most logical and useful option), great! But what if multiple keyframes are selected? Is it snapping all of those keyframes to the value I'm putting in with the TouchBar slider or is it adding/subtracting whatever value I input? Eesh. I don't know how to make this intuitive. It'd need a lot of work.

Pretty useless for position values because that needs x and y (and sometimes z). You'd need them separated to make use of the TouchBar and I don't see that really helping much.

Color values might be handy. You could have hue/saturation/lightness sliders or maybe RBG sliders? That might be handy for certain quick changes.

I'm definitely going to want the F4 key (toggle between columns) available all the time regardless of if I have anything selected or not. Working on a laptop screen, space is going to be at a premium, so I'm going to have stuff collapsed into each other as much as possible.

Wow. The more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. It would take me a week or two at least to work out all of the different options for how the TouchBar could be used and what it might affect.

Honestly, now that I've given it a lot of thought, if I were in charge of the AE team, I probably wouldn't do anything with the TouchBar except for making it as much like a normal MacBook function row as possible. If AE brings in the keyboard shortcut editor that the new version of Premiere has (which I expect they are planning to do), it would help every user of AE and not just those with the newest generation of MacBook Pros. The AE team is really small and the amount of work it would take to make TouchBar customization useful (SO MANY VARIABLES in AE!) compared to how many people even have a TouchBar would not be worth it.

A lot of creative video professionals are leaving Apple products right now. There is a rumble in the community that's been building for a while, but the announcement of these latest MacBook Pros seems to have sent a lot of people over the edge. All of the bad stuff that people used to hate about Windows is gone; Windows 7 and 10 are both great! And, at the same time, Apple seems to be ignoring the high-end professional market. Apple's stuff is still great for Photoshop/Lightroom and many other Adobe apps (if I were a photographer, I'd probably get an iMac), but when you start getting into video and especially motion graphics and 3d animation (the stuff I do every day), the offerings from Apple are rather lackluster compared to what you can get from Windows machines. So, as fewer motion graphics people use MacBook Pro's, the less reason there is to spend time on a feature that would only be used by a tiny minority of people.

I should point out that, as I type this, my workhorse for when I travel is a MacBook Pro. (But it's from 2011 and I am not likely to replace it with another MacBook if it ever dies unless Apple does something very different in their next "Pro" release.)