So what you are essentially saying here, is that for each website you use, taking this one as an example, you would rather download and install and use a separate native app that handles notifications independently of a single system wide resource, and that because this is your particular poison then no-one else should have the ability to do this in a slightly less bloated manner...? I'd hate to see your iPhone home screen.
Yep, correct. And my home screen is just fine - all apps are in folders and if a notification interests me, I can launch any app right from the notification center.
It is also not my "particular poison", it is a general concern about littering standardized platforms with proprietary junk.
While HTML 5 does cater for notifications about changes to a currently open web page, Apple goes a lot further than that. In the developer beta of 10.9 (no idea how it will be in the shipping version) Safari notifications are "on" by default (not opt-in), and the prompt each site gives you is not at all conspicuous. A huge percentage of users will just accept it, thus opening a permanent wave of information that will continue, even once you have left the page for good. Getting rid of it will involve a rather involved journey through the abysses of the System Preferences and Settings apps (with especially the settings.app on iOS already approaching a depth that rivals expert software).
Say what you will, but to me this is about as bad as MS's ruining of Web standards in the past, or Google's abuse of user data, even if Apple's intentions are most likely better. No Web site should prompt me for nonsense like that; it can offer as many subscribe, follow etc. links as it wants to, but never ever throw a dialogue in my face.
Could you emphasise what exactly you find gorgeous about it. From what is announced, it doesn't seem too different from ML.
The most important feature for me is clearly multi-monitor support and the ability to treat AirPlay devices as a monitor in this context. Since the appearance of Mission Control and Full Screen Apps, and the removal of multi-monitor features in QuickTime X, working, or even showing movies, on systems with more than one display was a disaster (actually worse than anything Macs could do even under the classic OS or just any version before 10.7).
In 10.9 they, IMHO of course, finally got it right. Not only from an OS X perspective, but miles ahead of any other OS. Each display has its own Spaces, Dock and Menu Bar, Mission Control can move stuff between all of them, there are System Preferences to fine-tune that behaviour... for somebody, like me, using multiple displays most of the time, this is huge. And it is extremely well done. That alone would justify an (old times) $129 upgrade for me... and it will cost far less, I assume.
For somebody having a mixed network in most places, the use of SMB 2 (iso AFP) as the default file sharing protocol is also quite substantial. Our 10.9 beta machines achieve much more consistent throughput in our test network.
iCloud Keychain is another feature I absolutely adore. Yes, there was Keychain syncing in .Mac and MobileMe before, and yes, if Apple would allow third parties (like 1Password) to hook into Safari on iDevices, they would have solved that problem long ago... Still, this is now a solution that scales well (serving millions of iCloud users, iso of just some die-hards paying $79 p.a.) and is more fine-grained (e.g. with intelligently treating credit card data and security codes separately, suggesting secure passwords etc.).
The next highlight (for me) is that all of the "Advanced Technologies" Apple touted really seem to work (no matter if I truly understand them or not, the latter being more likely). Battery life on my rMBP 15" is up significantly (I would see at least 20% with regular use, this might not be visible in tests or benchmarks, as it mainly benefits from idle phases or low activity, which benchmarks normally do not measure, but it is "there"), memory seems to be freed more rapidly (heavy multi-tasking is much more responsive), gestures, scrolling and zooming are clearly more responsive, pretty much "real time" (felt, not measured) in most cases. It may be hard to describe, but people often say the true art is to make difficult things seem simple. 10.9 does things flawlessly, were you could feel 10.8 was losing quite some sweat in the background.
The "Maps" integration throughout the system is much more useful than I imagined (I thought I wouldn't care for it at all, now I am using it all the time) and since we started to internally publish several of our SOPs and stuff as iBooks files about a year ago, even the desktop iBooks app and its reliable syncing of notes and bookmarks has proven to be quite a killer app (something I would have flat out denied initially).
So, in summary, for me there is a huge difference between 10.9 and 10.8 and almost all of it is enjoyable. From an corporate/admin perspective it is also quite a relief that there seem to be no relevant changes to the device driver architecture. We do use a lot of stuff here that is likely to cause trouble (MFPs, huge plotters, audio and video interfaces, screen and printer calibration devices etc.), and until now (knock on wood) absolutely everything just continued to work.
it is a general concern about littering standardized platforms with proprietary junk.
While HTML 5 does cater for notifications about changes to a currently open web page, Apple goes a lot further than that.
Push API
W3C Working Draft 15 August 2013
Abstract
This specification defines a “Push API” that provides webapps with scripted access to server-sent notifications, for simplicity referred to here as push notifications, as delivered by push services. Push services are a way for application servers to send messages to webapps, whether or not the webapp is active in a browser window.
Emphasis mine.
Agreed Apple is extending this a bit but the notifications are definitely coming to a browser near you.
Agreed Apple is extending this a bit but the notifications are definitely coming to a browser near you.
Hm, thanks for that! At least I can see now, where the different interpretations came from...
There is a "Push API" (as in your document) that explicitly mentions the possibility of notifications without the webapp being active, and there is a "Web Notifications API" (https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/notifications/raw-file/tip/Overview.html) which doesn't (and which is the one I was talking about).
"A natural solution is to ask the user whether such requests should be permitted. Long ago we learned that modal requests --- interrupting the application with a warning, and forcing the user to OK/Cancel before proceeding any further --- was ineffective for security, because users quickly learn to OK such warnings without even reading them."
And, of course, Apple is doing just that.
But then, the group working on the "Push API" document quoted by you do not seem to have the same concerns.
There's a surprising amount of resistance to this feature -- most of which seem to be coming from people that can't see how this would be advantageous to the end-user. Let me present a few scenarios:
A lot of us visit multiple websites daily, whether they be blogs, forum, social networks, news sites, etc. It's a lot to keep up on and a significant drain on our time to keep up on them all.
With a feature like this, we visit a website we really care about in Safari once. Just like when we open a new app in iOS for the first time, we're presented with an dialog asking us if we wish to grant this website the ability to send us push notifications. If we say 'no,' we never hear about it again. If we say 'yes,' the website will use Apple's push notification API to notify us on our desktops whenever there's something important to tell us.
So what does this mean?
Received a new private message on a forum you're on? Be notified instantly via Notification Center that a message awaits.
AppleInsider receives breaking news. If you've granted this website the ability to send you push notifications, you'll find out about these big announcements immediately. No longer do you have to keep refreshing the website or checking the RSS feed. Let the news come to you (that is if you want it, of course).
Did you just get outbid on Ebay? If you've allowed Ebay to send you push notifications, you'll be able to click on the notification to go straight to the auction so you can quickly counter-bid. Easy. No apps to install on your computer, and no resource drain by having to keep Safari or any other app open.
(just a few examples)
Granted, some websites will use this irresponsibly -- just like certain apps in iOS have been known to abuse them (::cough:: I'm looking at you Zynga ::cough::). The good news, as previously mentioned, was that we can then go to our System Preferences and revoke a website's permission to send us push notifications if we no longer find them useful.
Anyway, the sky is the limit. This will be an absolute fantastic feature.
I run a very busy bar/restaurant in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. Many of our customers want to know what live music (and other events) we have planned and on which days. We currently have an Events page on our website - if I can easily send a notification out when I add a new event I'm sure those customers would love it - a lot better than email blasting or events on Facebook (which always seem to get lost in the clutter). Sounds like a win-win for me and my customers.
Understood that this is only for Safari users on Mavericks but I'm cool with that; anything I can do to promote the Mac more is fine by me.
Good to hear a comment from the other side of the discussion. What you say makes perfect sense and I am with thoe that do not foresee this as a source of unwanted spam. It will be opt in only with system wide as well as fine grain control. This is Apple, not Facebook!
The most important feature for me is clearly multi-monitor support and the ability to treat AirPlay devices as a monitor in this context. Since the appearance of Mission Control and Full Screen Apps, and the removal of multi-monitor features in QuickTime X, working, or even showing movies, on systems with more than one display was a disaster (actually worse than anything Macs could do even under the classic OS or just any version before 10.7).
In 10.9 they, IMHO of course, finally got it right. Not only from an OS X perspective, but miles ahead of any other OS. Each display has its own Spaces, Dock and Menu Bar, Mission Control can move stuff between all of them, there are System Preferences to fine-tune that behaviour... for somebody, like me, using multiple displays most of the time, this is huge. And it is extremely well done. That alone would justify an (old times) $129 upgrade for me... and it will cost far less, I assume.
For somebody having a mixed network in most places, the use of SMB 2 (iso AFP) as the default file sharing protocol is also quite substantial. Our 10.9 beta machines achieve much more consistent throughput in our test network.
iCloud Keychain is another feature I absolutely adore. Yes, there was Keychain syncing in .Mac and MobileMe before, and yes, if Apple would allow third parties (like 1Password) to hook into Safari on iDevices, they would have solved that problem long ago... Still, this is now a solution that scales well (serving millions of iCloud users, iso of just some die-hards paying $79 p.a.) and is more fine-grained (e.g. with intelligently treating credit card data and security codes separately, suggesting secure passwords etc.).
The next highlight (for me) is that all of the "Advanced Technologies" Apple touted really seem to work (no matter if I truly understand them or not, the latter being more likely). Battery life on my rMBP 15" is up significantly (I would see at least 20% with regular use, this might not be visible in tests or benchmarks, as it mainly benefits from idle phases or low activity, which benchmarks normally do not measure, but it is "there"), memory seems to be freed more rapidly (heavy multi-tasking is much more responsive), gestures, scrolling and zooming are clearly more responsive, pretty much "real time" (felt, not measured) in most cases. It may be hard to describe, but people often say the true art is to make difficult things seem simple. 10.9 does things flawlessly, were you could feel 10.8 was losing quite some sweat in the background.
The "Maps" integration throughout the system is much more useful than I imagined (I thought I wouldn't care for it at all, now I am using it all the time) and since we started to internally publish several of our SOPs and stuff as iBooks files about a year ago, even the desktop iBooks app and its reliable syncing of notes and bookmarks has proven to be quite a killer app (something I would have flat out denied initially).
So, in summary, for me there is a huge difference between 10.9 and 10.8 and almost all of it is enjoyable. From an corporate/admin perspective it is also quite a relief that there seem to be no relevant changes to the device driver architecture. We do use a lot of stuff here that is likely to cause trouble (MFPs, huge plotters, audio and video interfaces, screen and printer calibration devices etc.), and until now (knock on wood) absolutely everything just continued to work.
Thanks for these thorough explanations. As I understand you, most of your arguments are from a professional perspective, which is fair enough. I probably have a mixed perspective and have to say that I expected more. I thought moving from cat names to a new naming scheme would be a chance to show us something more new. From what Apple presented, e.g. Calendar is new and all nice, but it doesn't have a particular touch. There are numerous possibilities to make OS X a quite different OS without loosing much familiarity. Maps and iBooks are fine, but nothing desperately missed (such as was Time Machine before its introduction). Don't get me wrong, I think its a nice OS and I don't want to keep 10.8, but a little more punch would be easily possible.
What on EARTH are you talking about? Do you similarly whine that you get notifications from Mail because someone sent you a message?!
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I don't mind getting phone calls from my wife but I sure as hell don't want to start getting them from Avid.com. Some notifications are part of a "social contract" and welcome while others are an intrusion, even via the same vehicle.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I don't mind getting phone calls from my wife but I sure as hell don't want to start getting them from Avid.com. Some notifications are part of a "social contract" and welcome while others are an intrusion, even via the same vehicle.
So you don't allow notifications from that website. Not that hard. You can't even selectively stop phone calls from numbers on your phone! This is already better than that.
It doesn't appear to be opt in; I can't get rid of these annoying Facebook notification sounds to save my life. I love how Maverick's just beeps at me for no apparent reason... #shittyideaonlyanadvertisingassholecouldlove
Comments
So what you are essentially saying here, is that for each website you use, taking this one as an example, you would rather download and install and use a separate native app that handles notifications independently of a single system wide resource, and that because this is your particular poison then no-one else should have the ability to do this in a slightly less bloated manner...? I'd hate to see your iPhone home screen.
Yep, correct. And my home screen is just fine - all apps are in folders and if a notification interests me, I can launch any app right from the notification center.
It is also not my "particular poison", it is a general concern about littering standardized platforms with proprietary junk.
While HTML 5 does cater for notifications about changes to a currently open web page, Apple goes a lot further than that. In the developer beta of 10.9 (no idea how it will be in the shipping version) Safari notifications are "on" by default (not opt-in), and the prompt each site gives you is not at all conspicuous. A huge percentage of users will just accept it, thus opening a permanent wave of information that will continue, even once you have left the page for good. Getting rid of it will involve a rather involved journey through the abysses of the System Preferences and Settings apps (with especially the settings.app on iOS already approaching a depth that rivals expert software).
Say what you will, but to me this is about as bad as MS's ruining of Web standards in the past, or Google's abuse of user data, even if Apple's intentions are most likely better. No Web site should prompt me for nonsense like that; it can offer as many subscribe, follow etc. links as it wants to, but never ever throw a dialogue in my face.
Could you emphasise what exactly you find gorgeous about it. From what is announced, it doesn't seem too different from ML.
The most important feature for me is clearly multi-monitor support and the ability to treat AirPlay devices as a monitor in this context. Since the appearance of Mission Control and Full Screen Apps, and the removal of multi-monitor features in QuickTime X, working, or even showing movies, on systems with more than one display was a disaster (actually worse than anything Macs could do even under the classic OS or just any version before 10.7).
In 10.9 they, IMHO of course, finally got it right. Not only from an OS X perspective, but miles ahead of any other OS. Each display has its own Spaces, Dock and Menu Bar, Mission Control can move stuff between all of them, there are System Preferences to fine-tune that behaviour... for somebody, like me, using multiple displays most of the time, this is huge. And it is extremely well done. That alone would justify an (old times) $129 upgrade for me... and it will cost far less, I assume.
For somebody having a mixed network in most places, the use of SMB 2 (iso AFP) as the default file sharing protocol is also quite substantial. Our 10.9 beta machines achieve much more consistent throughput in our test network.
iCloud Keychain is another feature I absolutely adore. Yes, there was Keychain syncing in .Mac and MobileMe before, and yes, if Apple would allow third parties (like 1Password) to hook into Safari on iDevices, they would have solved that problem long ago... Still, this is now a solution that scales well (serving millions of iCloud users, iso of just some die-hards paying $79 p.a.) and is more fine-grained (e.g. with intelligently treating credit card data and security codes separately, suggesting secure passwords etc.).
The next highlight (for me) is that all of the "Advanced Technologies" Apple touted really seem to work (no matter if I truly understand them or not, the latter being more likely). Battery life on my rMBP 15" is up significantly (I would see at least 20% with regular use, this might not be visible in tests or benchmarks, as it mainly benefits from idle phases or low activity, which benchmarks normally do not measure, but it is "there"), memory seems to be freed more rapidly (heavy multi-tasking is much more responsive), gestures, scrolling and zooming are clearly more responsive, pretty much "real time" (felt, not measured) in most cases. It may be hard to describe, but people often say the true art is to make difficult things seem simple. 10.9 does things flawlessly, were you could feel 10.8 was losing quite some sweat in the background.
The "Maps" integration throughout the system is much more useful than I imagined (I thought I wouldn't care for it at all, now I am using it all the time) and since we started to internally publish several of our SOPs and stuff as iBooks files about a year ago, even the desktop iBooks app and its reliable syncing of notes and bookmarks has proven to be quite a killer app (something I would have flat out denied initially).
So, in summary, for me there is a huge difference between 10.9 and 10.8 and almost all of it is enjoyable. From an corporate/admin perspective it is also quite a relief that there seem to be no relevant changes to the device driver architecture. We do use a lot of stuff here that is likely to cause trouble (MFPs, huge plotters, audio and video interfaces, screen and printer calibration devices etc.), and until now (knock on wood) absolutely everything just continued to work.
it is a general concern about littering standardized platforms with proprietary junk.
While HTML 5 does cater for notifications about changes to a currently open web page, Apple goes a lot further than that.
Push API
W3C Working Draft 15 August 2013
Abstract
This specification defines a “Push API” that provides webapps with scripted access to server-sent notifications, for simplicity referred to here as push notifications, as delivered by push services. Push services are a way for application servers to send messages to webapps, whether or not the webapp is active in a browser window.
Emphasis mine.
Agreed Apple is extending this a bit but the notifications are definitely coming to a browser near you.
Hm, thanks for that! At least I can see now, where the different interpretations came from...
There is a "Push API" (as in your document) that explicitly mentions the possibility of notifications without the webapp being active, and there is a "Web Notifications API" (https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/notifications/raw-file/tip/Overview.html) which doesn't (and which is the one I was talking about).
The one I was referring to does explicitly warn about implementations like Apple's, they even include a link to an article under http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/06/permissions-for-web-applications_30.html which states:
"A natural solution is to ask the user whether such requests should be permitted. Long ago we learned that modal requests --- interrupting the application with a warning, and forcing the user to OK/Cancel before proceeding any further --- was ineffective for security, because users quickly learn to OK such warnings without even reading them."
And, of course, Apple is doing just that.
But then, the group working on the "Push API" document quoted by you do not seem to have the same concerns.
A bit puzzled now!
There's a surprising amount of resistance to this feature -- most of which seem to be coming from people that can't see how this would be advantageous to the end-user. Let me present a few scenarios:
A lot of us visit multiple websites daily, whether they be blogs, forum, social networks, news sites, etc. It's a lot to keep up on and a significant drain on our time to keep up on them all.
With a feature like this, we visit a website we really care about in Safari once. Just like when we open a new app in iOS for the first time, we're presented with an dialog asking us if we wish to grant this website the ability to send us push notifications. If we say 'no,' we never hear about it again. If we say 'yes,' the website will use Apple's push notification API to notify us on our desktops whenever there's something important to tell us.
So what does this mean?
(just a few examples)
Granted, some websites will use this irresponsibly -- just like certain apps in iOS have been known to abuse them (::cough:: I'm looking at you Zynga ::cough::). The good news, as previously mentioned, was that we can then go to our System Preferences and revoke a website's permission to send us push notifications if we no longer find them useful.
Anyway, the sky is the limit. This will be an absolute fantastic feature.
The most important feature for me is clearly multi-monitor support and the ability to treat AirPlay devices as a monitor in this context. Since the appearance of Mission Control and Full Screen Apps, and the removal of multi-monitor features in QuickTime X, working, or even showing movies, on systems with more than one display was a disaster (actually worse than anything Macs could do even under the classic OS or just any version before 10.7).
In 10.9 they, IMHO of course, finally got it right. Not only from an OS X perspective, but miles ahead of any other OS. Each display has its own Spaces, Dock and Menu Bar, Mission Control can move stuff between all of them, there are System Preferences to fine-tune that behaviour... for somebody, like me, using multiple displays most of the time, this is huge. And it is extremely well done. That alone would justify an (old times) $129 upgrade for me... and it will cost far less, I assume.
For somebody having a mixed network in most places, the use of SMB 2 (iso AFP) as the default file sharing protocol is also quite substantial. Our 10.9 beta machines achieve much more consistent throughput in our test network.
iCloud Keychain is another feature I absolutely adore. Yes, there was Keychain syncing in .Mac and MobileMe before, and yes, if Apple would allow third parties (like 1Password) to hook into Safari on iDevices, they would have solved that problem long ago... Still, this is now a solution that scales well (serving millions of iCloud users, iso of just some die-hards paying $79 p.a.) and is more fine-grained (e.g. with intelligently treating credit card data and security codes separately, suggesting secure passwords etc.).
The next highlight (for me) is that all of the "Advanced Technologies" Apple touted really seem to work (no matter if I truly understand them or not, the latter being more likely). Battery life on my rMBP 15" is up significantly (I would see at least 20% with regular use, this might not be visible in tests or benchmarks, as it mainly benefits from idle phases or low activity, which benchmarks normally do not measure, but it is "there"), memory seems to be freed more rapidly (heavy multi-tasking is much more responsive), gestures, scrolling and zooming are clearly more responsive, pretty much "real time" (felt, not measured) in most cases. It may be hard to describe, but people often say the true art is to make difficult things seem simple. 10.9 does things flawlessly, were you could feel 10.8 was losing quite some sweat in the background.
The "Maps" integration throughout the system is much more useful than I imagined (I thought I wouldn't care for it at all, now I am using it all the time) and since we started to internally publish several of our SOPs and stuff as iBooks files about a year ago, even the desktop iBooks app and its reliable syncing of notes and bookmarks has proven to be quite a killer app (something I would have flat out denied initially).
So, in summary, for me there is a huge difference between 10.9 and 10.8 and almost all of it is enjoyable. From an corporate/admin perspective it is also quite a relief that there seem to be no relevant changes to the device driver architecture. We do use a lot of stuff here that is likely to cause trouble (MFPs, huge plotters, audio and video interfaces, screen and printer calibration devices etc.), and until now (knock on wood) absolutely everything just continued to work.
Thanks for these thorough explanations. As I understand you, most of your arguments are from a professional perspective, which is fair enough. I probably have a mixed perspective and have to say that I expected more. I thought moving from cat names to a new naming scheme would be a chance to show us something more new. From what Apple presented, e.g. Calendar is new and all nice, but it doesn't have a particular touch. There are numerous possibilities to make OS X a quite different OS without loosing much familiarity. Maps and iBooks are fine, but nothing desperately missed (such as was Time Machine before its introduction). Don't get me wrong, I think its a nice OS and I don't want to keep 10.8, but a little more punch would be easily possible.
What on EARTH are you talking about? Do you similarly whine that you get notifications from Mail because someone sent you a message?!
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I don't mind getting phone calls from my wife but I sure as hell don't want to start getting them from Avid.com. Some notifications are part of a "social contract" and welcome while others are an intrusion, even via the same vehicle.
But unlike phone calls, you get to completely control whether you want ANY calls, some calls, or all calls. How is that bad?
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I don't mind getting phone calls from my wife but I sure as hell don't want to start getting them from Avid.com. Some notifications are part of a "social contract" and welcome while others are an intrusion, even via the same vehicle.
So you don't allow notifications from that website. Not that hard. You can't even selectively stop phone calls from numbers on your phone! This is already better than that.
It doesn't appear to be opt in; I can't get rid of these annoying Facebook notification sounds to save my life. I love how Maverick's just beeps at me for no apparent reason... #shittyideaonlyanadvertisingassholecouldlove
It is.