REMOVE TOUCH BAR ICON!

[Tallboy]

This is so infuriating, and I'm hoping theres a way (via plist files or whatever) to fix it...

Spotify force-adds an icon to the 'collapsed' view of the clamshell view of the touch bar (the one you can customize).

This wouldn't be bad if their custom icon SHOWED UP in the 'customize' screen but when you go there, it disappears so you can't customize it (aka get rid of it).

Worst of all, this stupid new icon makes all the icons I ACTUALLY WANT 50% smaller to make room for the new icon. It's because it crams 5 icons into the spot where only 4 should go.

How do I get rid of this? Can you guys add an option not to mess with the touchbar, or at the very least make it so it shows up in the 'customize touch bar' area in settings?

I already have music controls in the collapsed touch bar, your stupid icon adds no functionality and just makes the touchable hitbox window of the existing buttons much smaller.

This literally couldn't be any more aggrevating because you're mucking with behavior that you shouldn't, and then making it so that you can't change it back. 

[pplaggenborg]

Adding this 5th button to the main Touch Bar is actually something Apple natively supports for some 'important' applications in the background.

With 4 main Touch Bar buttons the extra button makes 5 main buttons in total. These 5 buttons are resized to fit to the width of 4 button. I can see how the narrower width annoys you.

With only 3 Touch Bar buttons the extra button makes 4 main buttons in total. The main Touch Bar grows from 3 buttons to 4 buttons and displays all 4 buttons with the same button width. 

So far I've seen similar behaviour when a Media/Music application like Spotify and iTunes, or a Voice/Calling application like Facetime is active but in the background.

Try making a FaceTime call and switch to another application so FaceTime is in the background.

Slightly related to your concern about the Spotify Touch Bar behaviour, I do get rather confused about the two different states of the Touch Bar.

- Spotify in foreground, displaying all media keys

- Spotify in background, then activated in Touch Bar, displays scrubber and a few media keys.

Don't have a lot of experience using other Touch Bar supported applications, but right now it feels like it would make sense to make these two views similar.

Would appreciate customising the Spotify specific Touch Bar. Unfortunately this is now disabled.

[Tallboy]

Yeah good point, now that I think about it, the part that kills me about it being down there is that those collapsed icons are for actions that can be immediately invoked without tapping twice and performing 2 actions. My current ones are

- play/pause

- volume (still 1 action because i hold down and drag)

- expose

- view desktop

all those i hit dozens of times a day. But the spotify icon requires me to hit things twice, just wasting valuable space. seems like not a big deal but with the amount of times i pause/play music throughotu the day while people are talking to me/i take calls/etc its maddening

[pplaggenborg]

Yes, having to tap twice is annoying for something as vital as play/pause.

I've also added Play/Pause to the main Touch Bar buttons.

I understand that there is not enough space to have both the active application use Touch Bar and have more media control buttons for Spotify as well.

Learning to tap twice and learning where the expanded buttons are physically located would allow for an easier and quick 'Previous Track' or 'Next track' button press over time.

I'm more annoyed by the slow animation of the Touch Bar expanded. Having to wait a split second for my second button tap in the expanded Touch Bar.

But this is something only Apple can change I guess. Unless someone finds out a hack/workaround/plist setting for setting faster expanding Touch Bar timing.

[aburwash]

It is possible to set a shortcut in System Preferences under keyboard where if you press the function key (Fn), it shows the expanded touch bar instead of the function keys. It is definitely faster than the expanded animation.