Here’s why the existing notifications are no good. If you get a text, or an alert from any app carrying permissions to blast your screen, it completely interrupts whatever else you’re doing. A sizeable rectangular box pops up in the middle of the screen, and doesn’t go away until you address it. Furthermore, if you get notifications from multiple apps, there’s no way to tell until you clear one notification away and have another immediately pop up. And when it comes to high traffic apps like email (which would be foolish to enable popups for), it’s impossible to tell who’s sending you things with the more subtle badge alert on the app icon. Again, utter trash.
There have been rumours for awhile now that the iOS notification system was in the process of being revamped. And with WWDC on the horizon, many sources have said this new system will be introduced with iOS 5. Apple’s behind the scenes move seem to support this idea.
If you missed today’s news Apple hired Peter Hajas, a jailbreak developer who gained attention for his MobileNotifier iOS utility, which provided a slick notifications overlay for iOS. According to MobileCrunch, he’s currently in a trial period, but his extensive (and current) work on MobileNotifier seems to indicate that he’s being brought in to work on iOS’s notification system.
But a year ago, Apple made another, more important hire. They WebOS, you’d probably agree that they have the best smartphone notifications system, hands down. It’s powerful, flexible, and most importantly, stays the hell out of your way when you’re using a WebOS device.
Chances are, Dellinger will be the man responsible for the new iOS notifications system when it’s revealed on Monday (or whenever). And that’s reason for excitement.[MobileCrunch]
Steve
Saturday, June 4, 2011 at 3:35 PM“Apple made another, more important hire. They WebOS, you’d probably agree…”
Editing problems here.
ozoneocean
Saturday, June 4, 2011 at 5:03 PMHow hard and complicated IS this to address? I mean, really… With the massive monetary resources Apple has and the clever consumer oriented designers you’d think they could knock up something better in an afternoon. It simply cannot to a tricky thing for the. When I’ve seen design issues that have sticking points like this before the real issue has been designers or programmers who just refuse to change something because they think it’s perfectly ok and no amount of convincing save threats will make them do otherwise.
The notifications on my Android devices are simple and unobtrusive- just a sound with vibration (both can be turned off of course) and an icon and message in the top status bar You can pull that down to see what they are and get to the things from there or just go straight to the app yourself. Nothing else, no silly popups.
poltak
Saturday, June 4, 2011 at 9:18 PMAs an Android user, this is one of the only things I envy about iOS… I’ve always liked the way iOS pops up a message for notifications, rather than having to swipe down to check them on Android.
I’ve even got certain apps running to attempt to recreate that “iOS notification feel”.
I dunno… maybe that’s just me :\