Now that you can turn any Mac into a Touch Bar by plugging in Duet, we wanted to shed some light on the best ways to use touch bar.

Drawing & Photo Apps

Photoshop, Pixelmator, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Artistry Photo Pro, Photos, Sketch, OmniGraffle, Drop Color Picker

For users that use their iPad to draw, the touch bar is one of the most compelling features. It allows you to change brush size, colors, and much more without having to go back to your keyboard or computer.

Add that in with duet's intuitive gestures and touch, and you have a compelling and natural drawing experience.

Music Apps

djay Pro, Logic Pro X

Plenty of musicians love to use duet because it gives them more screen space, whether to perform live or produce music in the studio. With touch bar, you now have touch optimized controls depending on the context.

Even more, you can use multi touch to intuitively apply multiple filters and modifications at the same time in real time using just the touch screen.

Film Apps

Garageband, Da Vinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, iMovie

Similar to music apps, utilizing multi touch is one of the most natural ways to interact with a media project. With duet you could already do that on the screen, but with touch bar, you have an interface specifically optimized for your fingers.

This is a great experience for scrubbing, pulling up menus, or making modifications quickly while you are using the viewer on the iPad.

Writing Apps

Ulysses, Day One, OmniOutliner, Blogo, Bear (default support)

When you're in the zone, you want to do one thing: write. It can be quite frustrating to move the mouse around, make changes to fonts, colors, etc. when you are trying to pour your thoughts out.

That's why we recommend using duet with an external keyboard and touch bar. Using touch, you can jump around to any part of the display and make quick edits. With the keyboard, you have only the words to type to worry about. And now with touch bar, you can make complex changes to the document with a simple tap...and get back to writing.

Essential Apps

Safari, Microsoft Office, Keynote, Numbers & Pages, Coda, 1Password, PDF Expert

When you're working you want to work fast. The entire premise of duet is being able to do more, and touch bar for productivity apps help you achieve that.

Letting the developer pull up common actions that you can tap as you're typing allows you to work faster and accomplish whatever it is you are trying to do. Faster.

Mail & Messaging Apps

iMessages, Mail, Airmail, Spark for Mac, Skype

Chatting with friends is meant to be fun and light hearted. Pulling up an emoji with a mouse movement and several precise clicks is objectively not so.

Touch bar here allows you to communicate in a more friendly way.

Planning & To-Do Apps

OmniPlan, OmniFocus, Mindnode, Focus, Productivity Timer, Pomodoro Timer, Opus One, Calendar

A to-do list or planning app is meant for organization. But eventually, you have to get back to work, and touch bar is going to help you do that faster.

We've used OmniFocus & Calendar with touch bar and it is a truly beautiful experience. Being able to move faster in the app and figure out what is most important & urgent quickly can't be underestimated.

Anything that can make a to-do list or planning app better or easier to use is going to make sure you stick to the organization system, helping you out in the long run.

We hoped you liked our recommendations and can see different ways the touch bar can help your workflow. If you want to check it out, you can enable it in duet today.

Get Duet

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Get New Posts to Your Inbox

A successful marketing plan relies heavily on the pulling-power of advertising copy. Writing result-oriented ad copy is difficult. 

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.