There are several great little touches that they didn't talk about before now, and I'm personally very excited to have the USB music player back. It's definitely better than the other player, IMO.

Original post follows:

There's already a thread concerning one of the other features from this update, but there's nothing about these two features in the thread title or the original post.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/03/01/beta-for-playstation-4s-3-50-update-starts-soon-key-features-detailed/

• Friend Online Notification – Want to know the moment your friends come online? With this update, you can, as we’ve added an option to be notified when members of your friends list sign in on the network. Notifications can be tailored to certain friends.

• Appear Offline – Sometimes you want to play a game or watch a movie without being interrupted. Now it’s easier to go incognito as we’ve added the option to appear offline. You can designate if you would like to appear offline when you log-in or at any time from your Profile or the Quick Menu.

Does this also include that fucking terrible 'x friend has joined a party!' notification?

Glad this stuff is getting added finally, but it's borderline inexcusable that it took them two and a half years to get there.

Still no option to change usernames, though? I'm happy with mine so I personally don't require it, but that the option still isn't there after all this time is insane.

So they are finally catching up with technology from 15 years ago. Great.

I'd love to see the Gannt chart that was surely created for the implementation of "alert users when their friends come online."

It blows my mind how the PS3 and Vita have had the friends notifications and PS4 still hasn't gotten it yet. Is it that hard to code? lol

Was it late to PS3 and Vita as well? I don't remember.

Yay.

Still waiting for an update that will actually get me friends.

..

:(

You've been able to turn that notification off for over a year.

At the end, they mention that there are more features to announce, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

That would be the last update, which added the communities feature.

PS Plus games

Fighting games

The Division

Black Ops III

Wait, really? Must've missed it, I hate that thing. Thanks!

Me too! Where is it?!

Yeah, it's definitely there; not near a PS4 or I'd look it up for you. It's buried in a weird settings menu where I wouldn't have found it unless I googled for it first.

It's under Settings > Notifications. Uncheck the box for "When Friends Join a Party."

Can you pick individual friends to show a notification when they log on? if its not that then its useless. I have like 2 people of the 100+ on my friends list that I actually care to know if are online or not.

It's under the notifications setting. Not that weird a place I don't think.

"Friend Online Notification – Want to know the moment your friends come online? With this update, you can"

The future is now. Holy shit.

Thankfully, it sounds like you'll be able to do just that. As the official blog post mentions:

Notifications can be tailored to certain friends.

@spaceinsomniac: okay that's good. The friend folders were doing a good job for me but this makes it even better.

I cannot believe I still can't actually delete games from my library or organize them whatsoever. So hilariously dumb.

It's just been announced that this update will be releasing tomorrow. Along with it is a lovely game scheduling feature that should make PS4 communities much more useful, and make it much easier for the Giant Bomb community to get together and play some games. Looking forward to it!

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/04/05/playstation-3-50-system-software-update-out-tomorrow/

These new improvements, although late, are really appreciated. Show offline and see friend online notification were some of the ones I missed going from PS3 to PS4.

What I wasn't expecting was the remote play for PC and Mac, I wonder if it will work fine.

Even though I understand why some people might want this feature, I don't understand why everyone is so demanding about it, there's a shit-ton of other services out there that don't allow people to change usernames and no one really makes a big fuzz about it...

This is a big one for me as sometimes it's hard to know when friends are in for some multiplayer. I wonder if there's an export option to Google Calendar or anything?

This should be going live a bit later today, and there are some nice smaller features that they hadn't announced yet. Check it out:

I was excited for PC remote play but the fact it doesn't support Winblows 7 has me annoyed. I don't want to update to Winblows 10 even though its free.

If they added iPad support that would be better.

So I have a question,

I have my PS4 connected via cat ethernet cable, and my laptop is on WiFi. the PS4 is connected to the same modem / network as my laptop, however when I try and run PS4 Remote Play on my laptop, it says that it cannot connect to the server.

I notice the PS4 showing up in my networks list on my laptop, but it asks for a network security key when I click and try to connect to it. I'm assuming this PS4 connection is just a way of showing that it's open for receiving a connection?

I guess I assumed I would just need to download and make sure all requirements were met to play remotely on my laptop. I have everything downloaded, great speed, fast enough laptop, but I can't connect to PS4 remote play. Any advice? What step am I missing?

Wait there was no "Appear Offline" option already? I don't understand how developers don't see that as a standard required feature for these things. Like, battle.net STILL doedn't have that and they've had a thread about it on their support forum for (I just checked) 3 years.

Maybe a dumb question but did you turn remote play on, on the PS4 itself?

I was in the beta for the last month or so. Lackluster update all in all. The most interesting thing is the message preview.

Yeah, it's pretty silly. Fortunately, they did a great job with its implementation, though. The fact that you're invisible is displayed constantly in the home menu, so it's pretty much impossible to forget your status in that respect. The console remembers your status between sessions, so you don't have to turn invisibility back on every time you turn on your system. It's also great that you can choose which friends show online notifications. I would have loved to have had these adjustments to the 360 interface, when that was my primary console.

But yes. You could ask why weren't these features ready from day one, and I couldn't give you a reasonable answer. Better late than never, though.

Also, welcome to the forum.

I thought it was a really good update, personally, but I'm not someone who feels the need for folders or wants to change their PSN ID. What features did you want that would have made it a good update for you?

These are all features that sound like they really should have shipped at launch. Better late than never I guess but kind of hard to get excited about the ability to Appear Offline in 2016, two years after the launch of these consoles.

Yeah, nothing overly exciting in the update from my point of view. The option to remote play to PC/Mac is neat but that sounds like something they just needed to build a PC/Mac program to run since they already had it working on Vita and phones.

USB music player is probably the best feature though, even if the PS4 is already hurting for USB slots. Does anyone know if there's a limit to how big of a USB you can fit in?

If you don't know already, you can use a phone charger to charge your PS4 controller, USB wireless headset, etc. No idea how big of a USB drive works, but I'd say most any thumb drive would probably be fine. I wouldn't try my luck with a portable hard drive though.

Anyone else happen to know of a size limit?

These features are actually a big deal for me, so I'm really looking forward to trying out remote play and seeing how that works. There's a lot of TV sharing in my house, so this could be a... game changer? or maybe I should say... display changer?? *raises hand expectantly to receive a high five*

Appearing offline is nice. Now I can feel less shame.

Some developers believe "Appear Offline" is simply a bad feature. It's not that they can't do it, they just don't believe in it on design principle. "Bad for the community". I understand the argument, but yeah, many of us do like it. Anyways I dunno if that is the case at battle.net but I wouldn't be surprised. Blizz being Blizz.

Finally, no randoms steaming into party chats.