So I’ve been working with my new MacBook Pro with the TouchBar, and I’ve quickly come to realize that it’s a pretty useful input tool. While Roblox does not currently support this feature in any way, I’ve put some thought into why Roblox should, and how the TouchBar could be used to improve the Roblox experience, be it from the perspective of a developer or a player. Some interesting examples of how the TouchBar could be used with Roblox would include:
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In Roblox Studio, take the massive clunky Ribbon Bar at the top of the screen with all the player’s tools and plugins and whatnot, and move it down to the TouchBar as a row of tools and plugins. Not only does this free up a ton of valuable screen space, but it also allows developers to quickly scroll through their tools rather than sorting through tabs.
For an even better user experience, the Home/Model/Terrain/Test/etc. tabs could be pinned to the left of the TouchBar to allow players to jump around the row of tools to access specific categories of tools and plugins even quicker. Compared to the current way tools and plugins are managed, the TouchBar allows developers to spend less time hopping through menus to access the right tools, and more time actually developing games. -
Outside of tools, the TouchBar can also be great for setting colours when working with things such as GUI elements, ParticleEmitters, or any of the other objects in Roblox that allow players to set non-BrickColor custom colours. The colour slider on the TouchBar is a great method for setting colours, and it’d be a much better improvement compared to Roblox’s already-curious design decision to use a non-macOS-native colour selector in Studio (seriously, macOS already has a thing for setting colours in applications like this, it’s weird when you force your own inferior version of it in).
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On top of all of this, because the TouchBar API allows app developers to give their users different ways to customize the TouchBar, you could come up with many other creative alternative uses for the TouchBar, and allow developers to customize their TouchBar experience to whatever may best suit their workflow.
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Even outside of Studio, however, the TouchBar can also make an impact on Roblox in the player app. The most obvious feature, to me, would be to take the player’s inventory (the square icons at the bottom of the screen with the numeric hotkeys), and bring it down to the TouchBar. This would declutter the screen by a significant amount and give developers more room for custom GUIs, but it would also allow players to hold more items at once. As of now, the inventory is limited to 10 items, as the number keys only go from 0 - 9. When a player exceeds this amount of items, they have to hit tab and sort through their backpack and drag and drop a bunch of junk around to get to the stuff they want. With the TouchBar, players can hold as many items as they want, they can just scroll through their inventory on the TouchBar and have access to all of the items they can carry.
These are just a couple of examples that came to mind as I’ve been interacting with the TouchBar, and while I think these ideas alone have potential, I think Roblox could really run with this idea and come up with plenty of other creative uses for the TouchBar that even I haven’t thought of. This is a really exciting new ability for macOS developers to take advantage of, and I think that Roblox should definitely be one of the developers that do.