Badging API Explainer

PWA Discovery: You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet | Infrequently Noted

Smart thinking from Alex on how browsers could better indicate that a website is a progressive web app (and would therefore benefit from being added to the home screen). Ambient badging, he calls it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”

WebKit Features in Safari 17.4 | WebKit

It’s a shame that the newest Safari release is overshadowed by Apple’s shenanigans and subsequent U-turn because there’s some great stuff in there.

I really like what they’re doing with web apps added to the dock:

Safari adds support for the shortcuts manifest member on macOS Sonoma. This gives you a mechanism in the manifest file for defining custom menu commands that will appear in the File menu and the Dock context menu.

WebKit Features in Safari 17.2 | WebKit

Lots of new features landing in Safari, and it’s worth paying attention to the new icon requirements now that websites can be added to the dock:

To provide the best user experience on macOS, supply at least one opaque, full-bleed maskable square icon in the web app manifest, either as SVG (any size) or high resolution bitmap (1024×1024).

Desktop progressive web applications | Trys Mudford

Following on from my post about websites in the dock, Trys upgraded to Sonoma and added a handy copy’n’paste resource to his dock. It works a treat.

Sit with that for a second, you can write a desktop application with no tooling, launch it from your phone to the internet for free, and seconds later install it on any computer. I didn’t have to ask permission, or jump through any App Store hoops. I wrote a thing, pushed it to the internet, and then I could use the thing. Even better, I could send the link to Chris and he could use the thing. That’s the power of the internet.

Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

It’s great to see how (progressive) web apps are being supported on both iOS and macOS …I just wish the discovery were better.