While a number of developers have found useful applications for the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, Facebook engineer Adam Bell decided to go in an entirely different direction. He has managed to run the classic slide-and-shoot game Doom on the Touch Bar’s OLED display.
Doom is often used as a test of just what can be done with low-end hardware. With a display just 60 pixels high, the Touch Bar version isn’t going to pass any usability tests, but the game does run.
While the Doom Touch Bar experience is less than optimal, it’s still cool to see what developers like Adam come up with when they think “why not?” instead of “why?” (OK, we’re still mostly in the “why?” camp when it comes to this project, but hey, what do we know?)
There are a number of Touch Bar compatible apps currently available, and Apple has a whole section of their Mac App Store dedicated to such apps, including: Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator, 1Password, Drop – Color Picker, djay Pro, and many more.
Now if Apple will just release an external keyboard with the Touch Bar for those of us who won’t be buying a new MacBook Pro for awhile, everything will be copacetic. Here’s a recent concept of how such a keyboard might look.
