In a rare move, Apple last week issued a silent update to OS X Mavericks Gold Master as the company is supposed to share pricing and availability information about the software at today’s iPad event. And conveniently just a few hours ahead of the big reveal, a few high-profile websites have now flipped the switch on Safari push notifications.
For those uninitiated, this is a new feature of OS X Mavericks that allows web applications to send alerts which go straight to the Notification Center, even when Safari isn’t running.
Only a handful of websites have activated the feature, though others are expected to follow suit as soon as Mavericks goes public, which some watchers think might happen during today’s event…
As first noted by MacRumors, Safari push notifications have gone live on the NBA.com, Pinterest.com and the New York Times website. Push notifications is just one in a series of enhancements and under-the-hood improvements to Safari in Mavericks.
These web-based alerts let you subscribe to a website to get notified about, for example, updates to developing stories, after new content has been published and so forth.
Again, web applications and websites that have registered for the Safari push notifications are able to push these alerts to the Notification Center on their Macs even when Safari is not running, allowing for a better user experience.
As the screenshot above illustrates, an example web notification pops up in a message box which sports a website’s icon accompanied by a message and an actionable hyperlink.
The capability isn’t on auto-pilot as website owners have to opt-in and implement the feature. iDB will consider supporting Safari push notifications as another way of keeping our readers updated whenever a new article hits our homepage.
With iOS 7 and Mavericks, Apple is finally syncing notifications across devices so for example reading a notification on your iPhone automatically marks it as read on your Mac and other devices, and vice versa.
What’s your take on the Safari push notifications?
Are you looking forward to the feature?