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macOS Sonoma Tidbits: New FaceTime UI, Safari Profiles, Screen Sharing Improvements, and More

Love-hate 🍏 relationship said:
for people using Sonoma already, do you need to have safari itself opened , in order to launch a web app/pwa ? or can it be open undependantly?
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When you add a website to the Dock/Launchpad, it creates a "web wrapper" app independent of Safari (but still using WebKit). It's like a mini browser.

Note, this is NOT the same as a PWA, which requires that the website be built using specific PWA technologies. However PWA apps *combined* with this new web-wrapper feature brings us the closest to a real native app that you can have.
 
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This must be the first macOS release of nothingness yet. There is literally nothing to notes here of any interest to make it worth upgrading.

Widgets on the desktop is just Dashboard reincarnated. Even the web page as an app is just a glorified websnip tool for Dashboard.
 
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needsomecoffee said:
Not sure why/how you mean this. Here is what Apple support site says prior to current Safari update:

...However, you can't with the Safari browser. Apple are sadly years behind with allowing this but if you can bring yourself to do it......

Link:

Does Mac Safari(16.1) support PWA to add … - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com discussions.apple.com

We looked for a means to instruct users how to install our page as a web app with Safari, but could find nothing. All web content related to this issue said Safari Mac did not support PWAs. Likely we missed something, but if it was that hard to find it was of no use to parents looking to install our FOSS math app as a PWA.
Click to expand...

There seems to be a lot of confusion about PWAs.

PWAs utilize special "web worker" JavaScript features — which Safari fully supports — that allows the web app to be offloaded *into* the browser and can work offline. When implemented correctly, it does not require a server connection to fully function. Any data that needs to be sent to the server is cached and sent as soon as the app is back online. This allows the app to function when you don't have an internet connection.

What Sonoma introduced is a "website wrapper" feature — basically a mini browser instance, separate from Safari — that loads that specific website. It does not need to be a PWA, but if it is, then it behaves very closely to a native app.

Sonoma's web app feature is not magically *creating* PWAs. That work needs to be done by the website app creator.
 
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Corefile said:
This must be the first macOS release of nothingness yet. There is literally nothing to notes here of any interest to make it worth upgrading.

Widgets on the desktop is just Dashboard reincarnated. Even the web page as an app is just a glorified websnip tool for Dashboard.
Click to expand...

You need to look deeper. Changes are not always visible or new fancy features. There can be immense under-the-hood changes that make this version much better than the previous version.

Think about a car. A Mustang may look similar year after year after year — that's just what you "see". But it's what you don't see that matters:

  1. improved engine efficiency
  2. better fuel mileage
  3. smarter lane control
  4. more horsepower
  5. etc, etc, etc.

You can't judge a book by its cover, as they say.

Will it be worth upgrading? Yes.
 
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needsomecoffee said:
Not sure why/how you mean this. Here is what Apple support site says prior to current Safari update:

...However, you can't with the Safari browser. Apple are sadly years behind with allowing this but if you can bring yourself to do it......

Link:

Does Mac Safari(16.1) support PWA to add … - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com discussions.apple.com

We looked for a means to instruct users how to install our page as a web app with Safari, but could find nothing. All web content related to this issue said Safari Mac did not support PWAs. Likely we missed something, but if it was that hard to find it was of no use to parents looking to install our FOSS math app as a PWA.
Click to expand...

On iOS, you can choose any website to "Add to Home Screen". This creates a mini "Safari instance" and sets the opening page to whatever page you were on when you added to the Home screen. Adding to the Home screen is not creating a PWA. The website is either a PWA already, or not.

This Sonoma feature brings the same "Add to Dock" feature to Macs. It's just a mini browser instance separate from Safari. It works with any website.

Does that help?
 
System settings will stay as one of the biggest downgrade of MacOS, on par with the removal of exposé+spaces in macOS Lion. It is so frustrating that productivity is broken only to be replaced by toyish gimmicks.
 
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Will Safari profiles be added to Safari Tech Preview or does it have to have Sonoma to run? I am very interested in using them but I don't want to install Sonoma beta.
 
It would be nice to see writer's up their game a bit:

"All you have to do is visit a website and select File -> Add to Dock.... You can then give the web app a name and even change its icon."

Yes, you can, but you can also drag the resulting applications to Folders like the desktop, or create a folder of web apps (or a folder of alias's) and use that on the dock
 
East India Company said:
System settings will stay as one of the biggest downgrade of MacOS, on par with the removal of exposé+spaces in macOS Lion. It is so frustrating that productivity is broken only to be replaced by toyish gimmicks.
Click to expand...
As far as I know, expose spaces are still there, if you are talking about what I think you are. I use them all the time, I have specific applications assigned to specific spaces and drag my pointer over a hot corner and boom, there they are. You can still add and delete spaces, and even assign separate spaces to separate displays, even the air play display 1) Built-in, 2) attached hardware, 3) airplay. But I'm only on an M1 MBP, pretty sure you can do the same on Macs that support more displays.

And System Settings is fine, it works, it is searchable, I right click on my dock and see an alphabetical list. Nope, not seeing any reason for complaining here. Unless people just don't like change of any kind, but hey, change happens.
 
coolfactor said:
There seems to be a lot of confusion about PWAs.

PWAs utilize special "web worker" JavaScript features — which Safari fully supports — that allows the web app to be offloaded *into* the browser and can work offline. When implemented correctly, it does not require a server connection to fully function. Any data that needs to be sent to the server is cached and sent as soon as the app is back online. This allows the app to function when you don't have an internet connection.

What Sonoma introduced is a "website wrapper" feature — basically a mini browser instance, separate from Safari — that loads that specific website. It does not need to be a PWA, but if it is, then it behaves very closely to a native app.

Sonoma's web app feature is not magically *creating* PWAs. That work needs to be done by the website app creator.
Click to expand...
Thanks. I was wondering how without a Manifest this works. Thanks again to Apple for an elegant solution.

Note to Dan et. al. at MacRumors: This is not a small change, and eventhough I have been providing PWAs for a while now I found it confusing. This is pretty big (likely Apple responding to the EU complaints). I hope you might dedicate an article about this. Thx.

Edit: I am processing things pretty slow today. If this is a "web wrapper" and you cannot access the app when off-line, then SORRY it is not a PWA (which someone told me previously). Sadly this is Apple sowing confusion. PWAs are the way to go unless Apple's wrapper provides off-line access and independent local storage.
 
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Hi there, up to now FaceTime does not allow users to view screensharing if they participate in a FaceTime conference with a URL link (in browser). This is a HUGE downside, as you require Apple users in your conference if you want to show them your screen.

Has this been improved in recent Sonoma FaceTime?
 
Brad7 said:
Yes, they automatically show in Launchpad and in your user Applications folder (not in the general Applications folder with the other apps).
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I'm surprised the poster couldn't check this? Was this just a throw it against the wall and see what sticks comment? As soon as I read the post, I copied a web app from my desktop to the applications folder. Boom there it is on launchpad, and you can even create folders of these things, took me all of 30 seconds or so to test it.
 
MauiPa said:
I'm surprised the poster couldn't check this? Was this just a throw it against the wall and see what sticks comment? As soon as I read the post, I copied a web app from my desktop to the applications folder. Boom there it is on launchpad, and you can even create folders of these things, took me all of 30 seconds or so to test it.
Click to expand...
I just assumed he doesn’t have Sonoma yet and wanted to confirm some things before upgrading.
 
BenGoren said:
What I most want for Safari is for every top-level domain to sandboxed. That is, even if foo.com sets a bunch of Google and Facebook tracking cookies, when you visit bar.com, it has no access to them whatsoever. And, of course, if bar.com sets those same cookies, foo.com can’t see them, either.
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This is one of the main reasons I use Firefox (the other is uBlock Origin support).

It uses "containers" and you can define which websites go into each container. It's very useful for things like (a) keeping facebook locked into its own little world and (b) being able to log into multiple different Google accounts at once, if for example, you use one for Youtube, one for mails, one for work etc.

I'd like to move back to Safari, but for me the disadvantages of doing that outweight the advantages.
 
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osplo said:
That was my understanding too.

I just tried it in Word and Pages in Ventura and it doesn't work. Touching the keyboard kills the dictation.

I'm confused.
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just tried and it doesn't work indeed, interesting

perhaps was it only in iOS 16 ? aka iPhone since last year, but Mac only with Sonoma
 
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I’m guessing webapps can’t have tabs? That would be so useful for isolating web apps and groups of related pages. You can probably guess the problem i am hoping to solve (I currently run 3 browsers), but it would be great if Safari profiles had their own dock icon so you could Option-Tab between them.
 
Corefile said:
This must be the first macOS release of nothingness yet. There is literally nothing to notes here of any interest to make it worth upgrading.

Widgets on the desktop is just Dashboard reincarnated. Even the web page as an app is just a glorified websnip tool for Dashboard.
Click to expand...
Subjective much? Yes, desktop widgets already existed, but not for a looong time, and now they will be interactive. And there is a ton of other great improvements. But I guess you're not interested in installing this beta, so you're safe)
 
So, not sure if this is a long shot, but can anyone confirm whether or not Adobe Cloud apps, MSFT 365 and things like Box/Dropbox function properly?
 
They're packing too many things in the green traffic button. They should've let it stay a Zoom button, kept the fullscreen button on the right, and then they could've split the new menus and options between the two

I agree this update is pretty bare. Hopefully they'll use that to polish the many, MANY bugs and interface disasters they've ignored over the years
 
We set this up on a machine in the office yesterday and—other than that web app bit and the desktop widgets—there’s not much there. It doesn’t feel like a whole version’s worth of features does it?

The MacPro though? I threw $10,000 at Apple and look forward to the last week of June. The team is putting ideas together to stress test it now.
 
I hope those overlay and FaceTime enhancements/features work with things like Discord.
A bit disappointing when developers prefer to skip out built-in/native libraries when targeting specific platforms (due to time or money constraints maybe)… it tends end up missing on all of the nice subtleties that the apple engineers have spent a decade+ perfecting.

Some cannot be forgiven though, like the iOS YouTube apps (scrolling, maximizing/minimizing gestures, the keyboard have taken a trip to bizarro land) or the video player inside the Amazon prime tvOS app. That sounds more like stubbornness and mismanagement than an actual lack of resources.
 
I am using CCC so can’t really install beta Willy-nilly anymore. But if those are the key features found so far, I guess I can wait until the offical release.
 
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