The more I use the Touch Bar (or rather, look at it wishing it actually did something useful), the more I’m thinking of all of the missed opportunities. Fortunately, these aren’t fundamental design limitations, but only limitations with what we have to today.

Here’s a list of what I actually want in the touch bar:

1. Fully customized Touch Bar region with Control Strip (we only have the “extended control strip option” today, and it’s missing functionality compared to the control strip present with the app controls enabled).
2. APIs to add items into the control strip portion, like both iTunes and Xcode can do. I’m guessing that this will eventually come.
3. Automator support to build up custom control strip items. This is a fantastic use case as it allows me to dictate what my quick and easy commands are. Though… with the announcement of the termination of both Sal and his position, I’m greatly concerned that Apple is becoming quite clueless here.

Those features above, those are “pro” features. Contextual app elements, especially those that are simply showing the same stuff in the app, like the “save” and “cancel” buttons (I mean really? I’d love to have been there for the conversation on how is such a great feature, are, in the nicest terms possible, a supremely weak use case.

I’m hopeful that things will get better. Maybe the control strip API support was just not ready yet (it is already a super buggy area. Once you have iTunes or Xcode open, you’ll get an empty icon in the control strip).

I guess I’ll continue my waiting for the “pro” Apple.