Supercharge Your MacBook Touch Bar
Your Touch Bar Becomes Useful, Finally!
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What’s With the Touch Bar?
Over the years, Apple’s MacBook Pro Touch Bar has gained the notoriety of being “an unneeded feature turning unwanted” (along with the dreaded butterfly keys). And without surprise, I felt the exact same I got a MacBook Pro as my main machine. Despite promising to be a supplement to your workflow, I didn’t really see how it helped by showing buttons triggering actions that I’ve already bounded to my keyboard. Here’s a good example:
Who actually uses this button on the Touch Bar when you can Cmd+T?
That doesn’t go to say that all features of the Touch Bar aren’t welcome. For one, changing volume and brightness becomes super gratifying: just press and hold, then slide your finger left or right to adjust your volume/ brightness with style. The fact that you can customize this right-hand “control strip” (as Apple calls it) is also a big plus which they definitely should earn credit for.
If you’ve clicked into this article, there’s a good chance that you tried customizing your Touch Bar into something more useful. Maybe have the Touch Bar show the full control strip all the time? Or have it only show function keys? Or have you just admitted defeat and been reluctantly using the default setup the entire time?
Or, what if … there’s an app that can transform your Touch Bar into this:
Here’s Pock
What you just saw right above was all done using Pock. It was a dream come true when I found it for the first time: it turns the Touch Bar into a dock, status bar, and media/general control strip, all at the same time! Oh, and it’s even open-source!
NOTE: I am not affiliated with the creation of Pock, nor am I being paid to endorse this app. What’s written in this article is a showcase of the app based on my personal experience using it!
All of these features (the dock, status bar, etc.) are called “widgets” by Pock’s vocabulary. Pock widgets can be installed, added, and arranged onto the Touch Bar similar to buttons on the control strip. In fact, the widget UI is almost 1-to-1 with the default control strip customization menu. To introduce widgets onto your Touch Bar, click and drag them from this menu down to your bar, and it’ll magically appear!
Pock recently included even better support with the default control strip, meaning that you are able to keep those slick volume/brightness shortcuts with your brand-new widgets (the Pock Control Centre does the same job, but not as clean as the Apple default). Basically, you can have this cool-looking setup that I just showed on the title image.
Wait, is that a cursor? Yes! By default, Pock lets you use and move your cursor to interact with the Touch Bar, especially the dock widget. Just hover your mouse near the middle bottom of your screen, and the cursor will appear right on the Bar.
And, what if you want to switch app to the old Touch Bar? Not to worry: just press your Control (⌃) key twice and the default Touch Bar will reappear.
There are a bunch of other customization settings and features that I might miss here, so have fun discovering the full potential of Pock for yourself!
Where do I get Pock?
You are able to get Pock through its website: pock.app. When installing for the first time, Pock may ask you to allow some permissions on system preferences; this allows widgets to work properly (e.g. dock and media controls).
Because it’s open-source, Pock is available on Github too. Soon, Pock will also introduce custom widgets contributed by the community created with PockKit, which is under development.
More Mac Goodies?
If you’re curious about more Mac software for productivity freaks or developers, check out my previous articles below. (I’m in a long streak of Mac-related articles, pardon me!)
