Making use of the touch bar in the MBP 2017 is the subject of this entry. The touch bar is useful for musicians and artists, I made use of it here in relation to some soundart experiments. One cannot really say it is a replacement for larger midi or OSC controllers. The amount of knobs and sliders you can fit into one screen is limited by the available space. That said, you can have various pages which the user can flip through giving access to different controller numbers and midi numbers. I used the touch bar as a midi controller, sending midi to Processing and Max / MSP. This works pretty seamlessly in the first tests I did. I made use of a very handy midi app for touch bar called "MIDI touchbar". A link to that app is provided here: MidiTouchBar.
In the experiments the touchbar is used to send midi information to Processing via the use of the midi library. Then this midi information is scaled with "map" to create the right kind of numbers (depending on the sketch). In the present case the mapped components were stored in float variables in Processing and sent to a shader via the "uniform" key word. At the same time the midi information controls some aspects of a Gen~ patch in Max / MSP.
The video below shows the program in action. It is not difficult to set up the parameters and map them to the Processing and Max. There is a specific library for Processing to get midi information. The Midi app itself must be set to the IAC driver in the mac utilities.
The shader code is a modification of some work from the book of shaders:
Some of the Max sequencing is based on Gregory Taylor's descriptions of the "Rate" object.