🆕 [v3.6.9] AquaTouch – The Powerful Touch Bar Redesign.

[Dom]

@yuuiko hei man! How are you? I'll try to stop you in time, before the new release ahah ... I updated my MacBook Pro today to Catalina and the player button in the control strip doesn't appear in any app!

Have you notice this bug on your side? (I've even updated btt with latest alpha release but nothing changes)

[yuuiko]

Just about to post!
I've fixed the play button to be more robust and handle the fact that iTunes doesn't exist. Hopefully it doesn't disappear as i'm coding blind here.

Catalina support might not come soon as I'm quite busy and I can't really afford any hiccups that happen with catalina at the moment.

oof,
Checking again, I seem to have forgotten to update the buttons with the quickstrip open! nice save.

(aah i always get nervous with updates, I hope nothing goes wrong!)

[yuuiko]

AQT v3.5.3 (8 OCT 2019)

Efficiency Improvements and Refinements

---

Focused on performance and efficiency, This update greatly reduces CPU usage compared to v3.5.2. Some refinements to existing features have also been added, along with a few new app layouts and tools.

---

Download

Download at the AQT Downloads Page ➔

---

Changelog

Performance Optimisations

AQT is now SIGNIFICANTLY more energy efficient.*

Sorry for draining the batteries of your laptop . I hope those of you in cold weather at least enjoyed the warm lap / hand warmer!

As you can see here, AQT was shockingly behaving very badly. I wasn't aware of this until I installed Intel Power Gadget just recently.

The main culprit was calendar requests, and menubar checks.
By reducing calendar access from every 5 seconds (to update the widget accurately after changing settings and waking from sleep). I managed to be able to seperate the widget update from the calendar requests, so now calendar requests only happen every two minutes with the widgets still updating accurately.

This and various other optimisations result in AQT being almost the same as default macOS, I've noticed no more oddly warm lap heater and perceived increased battery life (though I'm not sure if it's actually longer...)

Unfortunately I haven't found a way to make menubar checking widgets more efficient, but I've adjusted their timings so at least they somewhat run under 2.5GHz clock speed. Preview and Stickies are the two main apps that contain these. I have sent in a feature request for a BTT native widget to be made if possible.

• Optimise the QuickShedules button (in the QuickStrip).
• Calendar icon in the CS is now more efficient when highlighting is turned off.
• Optimise the "No Apps Playing" message with the QuickPlay widgets
• Remove highlighting from "BUISH" buttons in onenote as they caused high CPU temperatures and never worked well anyway.

*for most apps.

New Features

New External Disks widgets!

Supports up to 5 disks. Find them in the new finder set and in Quickctions.

Finder is now a replacement set!

I combined my own finder native touchbar and AQT's extra tools. I wanted to add tags because I use it often but that doesn't seem feasable yet.

Preview is now a replacement set!

I'm quite proud of this one! Features three tabs, "View", "Edit" and "Markup", enabling you to streamline your editing and scribbling better.

Switches layouts based on the file type that is open; Document-related controls won't show up for an image and vice versa. Switching document types also doesn't switch the tabs! Seems expected but that was interesting to implement.

Brave browser added.
Literal copy-paste from safari. No web widgets yet. If I feel like it then I might add support, Brave seems to support scripting.

Keyboard shortcuts for kahoot.it
Keyboard shortcuts for kahoot.it web widget because I kept loosing hopefully my new weapons will allow me to beat my class :⎤

Notes

Added continuity camera button to notes as a small extension set. Useful for lectures - use your iPhone as a camera for your Mac to take pictures that instantly show up in notes.

New Github Desktop Client TouchBar

Big push and pull buttons, and shortcuts to view repo in the Finder, Web or Terminal.

Quality Improvements

Spotify
Genius button now Highlights and automatically switches back to Spotify on error.

iTunes
Shuffle and Repeat buttons scroll away so more content can be seen while scrolled.

Web Widgets

Youtube Widget (in Safari) will now give prompts to enable scripting for websites. You can also tap the tip to let AQT set the stuff for you.

---

Google Mail Widget Should now show a setup tip noting that keyboard shortcuts need to be turned on in Gmail settings.
Web Widgets now auto-close when switching away from the site to keep touchbar controls relevant.

QuickMedia

• Main Media controls (grey, leftmost in the QuickMedia) now displays the icon of the app that they will control.
• Added back an optimised "No supported apps playing currently" message.

QuickControls
TrueTone and NightShift buttons should now highlight if on.

Bug Fixes

• Youtube widget in Chrome now displays "YouTube" instead of "YouTube Chrome"
• QuickPlay button more robust - less chance of disappearing
• Downloads button in Safari's "Window" touchbar menu fixed
• Various small alignment fixes and visual enhancements.

---

[Pietro_Coelho]

hi @yuuiko thanks for aqua touch! I would just like to report that the button for muting the microphone on Zoom is not working

[rockstar4ever2]

Update is working absolutely beautifully. I'm very happy and thankful for youtube working and the media control group showing all now playing items. This preset is so amazing it deserves 6 stars.

[rockstar4ever2]

Inside of the group Connectivity Actions Beats Battery is not functioning for me.

[yuuiko]

@Pietro_Coelho

The microphone mute button controls the system microphone sensitivity and sets it to 0 as opposed to targeting zoom’s microphone mute function. Could you double check if the icon is changing from a white microphone to a grey crossed-out microphone, and also check if the microphone sensitivity changes in system preferences → sound?

Either way, I may rethink the way it works and target zoom instead, but do check if it is indeed controlling the system microphone sensitivity as designed.

@rockstar4ever2
Unfortunately I’m unable to debug this issue as I don’t own beats myself. I’ll take a look sometime soon though, and a little more information would be very helpful. The best would be a video showing how it acts when idle, connecting, connected and disconnecting.
Otherwise screenshots would suffice (⌘⇧6 to screenshot the touchbar)

[rockstar4ever2]

I don't know how much this will help. built in screen recording didn't capture the touch bar

[dnnsmnstrr]

I went through and tried to fix the compatibility issues with Catalina. While I was at it, I refactored the QuickGroups to use the correct names everywhere.

https://share.folivora.ai/sharedPreset/321eaa8b-0d69-4707-83bd-3b1fd40e151e

My Solution for the play-button was to change any references to iTunes in the AppleScripts to 'Music', which replaced iTunes. I assume that the scripting interface has remained the same, but I haven't tested it, since I don't use AppleMusic.

Really happy with this update, btw!

[yuuiko]

hm yeah...

May I contact you sometime soon, maybe in two months to solve this issue?
(probably through forum PM)

This one needs a little discussion to be fixed and debugged, but I’m way to busy now to do it. That okay?

[yuuiko]

eeek you probably saw my lazy code!

Really appreciate that help though, I’ll look into that preset sometime soon and probably merge it in

What exactly did you change for Catalina support? I recall removing the iTunes check for quickstrip buttons in the last update

[dnnsmnstrr]

I'm really happy to help, you can contact me anytime!
I'll try to commit the script files I changed in a fork I made of your GitHub Repo. Then I can make a pull-request so you can easily merge them in.

[yuuiko]

wow complicated, still trying to get my head around how git works

[vandreykiv]

Calendar widget broken in Catalina due to issues with icalBuddy.

icalBuddy  eventsNow
2019-10-10 10:25:09.345 icalBuddy[72453:3664600] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: 'NSConcreteMutableAttributedString addAttribute:value:range:: nil value'
*** First throw call stack:
(
	0   CoreFoundation                      0x00007fff2df06d63 __exceptionPreprocess + 250
	1   libobjc.A.dylib                     0x00007fff63df5bd4 objc_exception_throw + 48
	2   Foundation                          0x00007fff305641a4 +[NSPointerArray pointerArrayWithOptions:] + 0
	3   icalBuddy                           0x0000000108c0d016 getEventPropStr + 949
	4   icalBuddy                           0x0000000108c0d305 printCalEvent + 452
	5   icalBuddy                           0x0000000108c05b8b main + 1761
	6   libdyld.dylib                       0x00007fff65154405 start + 1
	7   ???                                 0x0000000000000002 0x0 + 2
)
libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
Abort trap: 6

[yuuiko]

Thanks for the report,
(eek i don’t understand the logs though)

did iCalBuddy throw any Ui errors?

Unfortunately i’m not able to upgrade to catalina/work on AQT as i’m focusing on other important things

[Andreas_Hegenberg]

I'll provide a fixed iCalBuddy version soon, maybe later today.

[Nick_Merc]

Thank you Sir! Looking forward to getting iCalBuddy up and running in my GeekTool applet!

[Andreas_Hegenberg]

sorry it’s a bit delayed, I think I’ll be able to upload it tomorrow.

[evaanm]

Thank you so much for AquaTouch! Loving it so far.

As an annoying American: In the Calendar view, is there any way to make the date read mm/dd/yyyy instead of dd/mm/yyyy? Thank you!

[Andreas_Hegenberg]

Ah glad I was so slow, the author of the 64bit iCalBuddy version has just uploaded a new Catalina build that fixes various issues:

DavidKaluta/icalBuddy64