Maybe you could enlighten me to some of the possibilities. Besides a slider, I'm not really seeing much productivity enhancements that functions keys cannot do.
Not sure if there will be TouchBar user interface toolkit for java applications, but I spend a lot of time in IntelliJ. It would be great if the TouchBar rather than having to remember mappings, could have sets of labels [Step In, Step over...] during an active debug session or a different set during editing or presentation modes. Currently, the solution is to have myriad toolbars and icons bespeckle the window frame, which can be distracting and confusing, and all together take up some valuable laptop screen real estate.
I guess you can have virtual function keys as well as buttons for specific terminals. It depends how locked down the SDK is - knowing Apple it'll probably become more extensible as time goes on. I imagine that when IDEs can integrate with it, you'll be able to get some pretty nice features.
You can also show stuff like CI status, notifications for IMs, etc.
Why is everyone so upset about this? It is a dynamic part of the keyboard. I would be shocked if there was no option to set it "classic mode" for certain applications (or even universally if you wanted), which would have the ESC key and the function keys. Why the opposition? Having a dynamic part of a keyboard is pretty innovative, what are some of the possibilities, I am not 100% sure but I am sure that developers will find neat and useful (and probably unexpected by us and by apple) things to use it for.
