Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

I feel really uncomfortable about that. But the coincidence made me buy an Apple notebook. Honestly, I have all the Apple products and I don't really want any more, but more and more users of my apps and websites are asking me to port my games to iOS.

I had been thinking about making that purchase for a long time. But this time, I received an offer that I couldn't resist. I bought a MacBook Pro for 3,500 CZK.



I got it with the original box, too, so unboxing it was quite nice. My first impression was that it is really thin. However, when I took it out of the box for the first time, I was unable to turn it on, and plugging in the USB-C charger made no difference. I took some USB measuring devices and tried many USB-C adapters until I finally managed to get it charging. After about half an hour, it finally booted up. I then went through all the initial settings and got it working. Some of the first issues arose during this process. I was unable to click on anything. After a few minutes, I finally realised that I couldn't just click the touchpad; I had to press it firmly. This was quite annoying, but I was then able to adjust this behaviour in the settings.



Another really problematic issue was that I was unable to type the symbol '@'. It was nowhere on the keyboard and I tried all the common combinations to write it, but I struggled with it for about five minutes until I finally wrote it by accident. Then I was scared to delete it and try again because I wasn't sure if I could write it again.

After the initial setup, I started installing Xcode to develop apps. I also tried installing some games out of curiosity. Everything started downloading and, while this was happening, I decided to adjust the settings, such as the clicking and 'natural scrolling'. I also deleted all the unnecessary icons from the Dock and tried to familiarise myself with the system.

The touch bar is absolutely terrible. The biggest problem with that bar is that it could be really useful, but it isn't. Now it's just something annoying that you can show your friends as really cool stuff, but beyond that it's just a mess.



And why? Because I can see many situations in which the bar could be really useful. For example, apps can set their own buttons for specific functions. For example, IDEs could have fast shortcuts for compiling, debugging, etc., and some chat clients could have preset emojis to type. So, yes, it could be quite handy. But it isn't. My biggest problem is that even quite common keys do not have physical buttons, but just touch buttons. For example, the "ESC" key, or the volume and mute buttons. This means that you cannot press Escape or change the volume without finding it on the touch bar. Even worse, these controls travel along the whole bar and change position based on the focused window — each program moves them as it wants. This drives me mad. You can never tell where your controls will be.

So, it seems it would be a lot of hard work, but I really want to develop apps for iOS. I want to satisfy the players and maybe earn some money to cover the expenses.