Best Touch Bar games and apps: How to have fun with your Macbook Pro’s Touch Bar. We list the best games and weird uses for the Macbook Pro’s Touch Bar, from Pac Man and Pong to Knight Rider effects, Nyan Cat and virtual instruments.
Trick Out Your Touch Bar With These Creative Apps and Games. I don’t know about you, but I’m still on the fence about Apple’s Touch Bar. The most use I get out of it is accidentally tapping. Launch the game, tap on the Touch Bar to start your little dinosaur running, and then keep tapping to make him jump over each approaching cactus. TouchBarPong Jason Cipriani/CNET.
One of the biggest new features on the 2016 Macbook Pro is the Touch Bar, a touch-sensitive strip that sits above the keyboard and delivers handy visual controls and time-saving shortcuts, tailored to your current task. We’re definite fans, as you’ll see in our full Touch Bar review.
You can also have a lot of fun with the Touch Bar and even play some basic games, thanks to some crafty tinkering from Mac fans. Here we’ve rounded up some of the best games and silly time wasters involving the Macbook Pro’s funky strip.
Read next: Macbook Pro Touch Bar tips and tricks
Best Macbook Touch Bar games and apps: Pac Man
Everyone loves a bit of Pac Man, although you’d probably never think that this addictive arcade game would translate to the Macbook Pro’s Touch Bar. Well, you’d be wrong. It’s perfectly possible to play a version of the pill-popping game on that thin strip, by downloading it from here.
Sadly it’s a rather basic version, as you might well expect. The thin nature of the Touch Bar means you don’t get a full-on maze to negotiate, just a single row with cunning portals. And there’s only one ghost to evade, although he’s a nippy bugger.
Best Macbook Touch Bar games and apps: Get musical with Touch Bar Piano
If you want to practice your finger action on the move, you can use this nifty Touch Bar Piano to belt out a snippet of Chopin. Like those classic keyboards you can choose from a massive variety of sounds, including organs, guitars, wind instruments and weird special effects. Brilliant fun and a great way to annoy whoever’s sat next to you on the bus.
Best Macbook Touch Bar games and apps: Pong
One of the very first video games can now be played on your premium-priced laptop, using the Touch Bar for precise controls. Play against an easy or difficult to beat AI opponent, with the same fast-paced gameplay you remember from back in the day (if you’re old enough).
You can grab Touch Bar Pong here.
Best Macbook Touch Bar games and apps: Nyan Cat
We’ll allow the creator of this hilariously pointless Touch Bar app sum it up, as he does a better job than we ever could:
“Stupid Nyan Cat animation on your +$2k MacBook Pro’s Touchbar. Enjoy.”
If you still can’t get enough of Nyan Cat in 2017, your dreams are about to be realised. You can grab Touch Bar Nyan Cat here.
Best Macbook Touch Bar games and apps: Knight Rider
This Knight Rider homage is about as pointless as it is entertaining for fans of the Hoff’s old telly show. Load up the app and your Touch Bar will light up just like KITT while the original theme tune plays. The novelty wears off after about half a minute, but what a half a minute.
Interested? Grab Touch Bar Knight Rider here.
Best Macbook Touch Bar games and apps: Dino (Google Chrome easter egg)
The Dino secret hidden game is an easter egg hidden away in the Google Chrome browser. To access Dino, all you normally have to do is make sure your Macbook is offline and then browse to anything inside Chrome. You’ll notice a warning page pop up with a cute little dino pic. Now just tap the spacebar on your laptop and the dinosaur will pop to life and begin running. Tap the bar again to jump over the pesky cacti that get in your way, and see how far you can go before Dino becomes extinct.
Touch Bar Games Pet
Touch Bar Games Mac
You can also play a Touch Bar version of the Chrome Dino game at any time, if you’re a big fan. Just head over to Github and download the app, which gives you full Touch Bar controls and graphics. Interesting.
Touch Bar Games For Mac
Read next: New Macbook Pro tips, tricks and best hidden features