How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail | Hacker News Reader

How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail

theinvisibl.com

189 pointsandre3k134 comments

We do the same thing for the Notifo iPhone app, except our "magic number" is 1. If you are the top of the list, new notifications slide in and push the list down. If you are scrolled down past the first notification, new notifications load in, but the list stays still (a non-trivial thing to do with UITableViews). I never knew the mail app did the same thing (I have mine set to refresh manually); it just seemed like the reasonable thing to do.

Twitter’s Mac app does this, too, it also only scrolls if you are not farther down than one tweet. (Automatic scrolling, which is off by default, has to be enabled.)

Most (probably all) chat clients (IM and IRC) do this too. I think it is more common than the author gives credit for. It's invisible unless it's missing.

I think the best UIs are generally full of the "invisible unless it's missing stuff".

Thats the subtle stuff that is often hard to get right.

Friendfeed implements this, on the website, and I really wish quora would also. I'm always in the middle of reading something on quora when the content moves around. It's particularly jarring on mobile devices, I lose my place a lot.

Slightly OT, but I use and love Notifo. After recently getting an Android phone I've discovered that Android's notification mechanism absolutely destroys the minimalistic implementation on iOS.

This is a great breakdown, thanks. Now can you explain why so often I receive an email on the iPhone and one of two things happens:

1. I'm not in MobileMail.app, get a notification that an email arrives, but when I enter the app, nothing is there. When I manually hit the refresh mail button, the new message downloads and appears.

2. If I'm in MobileMail.app a new email arrives and I see it up top for a few seconds, and instantly it disappears. Again, I have to tap refresh to re-download the message.

Why does this happen?

Come on man. What does this have to do with the article? In any case, I have had no such problems with my iphones, so I'd say you either got a faulty unit or maybe it's a service provider issue.

I think it's somewhat relevant since the article discusses incoming mail handling in MobileMail.app. And obviously it's not a hardware issue or 'faulty unit' as you say. It's a well documented issue.

What does this (potentially rare [0]) bug have to do with the article? Why should the author of the article be able to know the reason for this bug? Why are you asking that question here?

[0] I personally never encountered it.

1. I'm not in MobileMail.app, get a notification that an email arrives, but when I enter the app, nothing is there. When I manually hit the refresh mail button, the new message downloads and appears.

Your iPhone is connected to a push server; the server sends your phone a few bytes that indicate a new message is available to be downloaded, but it does not begin downloading the message itself until you enter MobileMail.app. (Messages.app is different since your carrier pushes messages in their entirety).

I have the exact same issue - I use gmail and IMAP with iPhone3G.

You should try gmail + ActiveSync push. Made the leap a week ago, and the whole mail experience feels a lot smoother.

Beware, it tends to burn up your battery a bit quicker as well.

I don't have an iPhone, but I do have a question...

What if you've sorted the list (by sender, for example) so the 'natural' place for the new message is half way down your list? Will it determine a travel delta or something similar to determine whether to snap you to the message?

I'm guessing you can't sort your email.

I've run into this problem before (how to orient a view of a list that is updated in the background). Google, for example, partitions the list into 'all items' and 'new items' so if you've paged half way through the list, the incoming item is added to the 'new items' view and a visual indicator is made that a new item exists (cf. Google Reader).

> I'm guessing you can't sort your email.

Correct.

Your post reminds me of a discovery I made a few weeks ago that BLEW MY MIND:

You can not sort messages in Gmail.

I'm betting that reading that statement just caused a bunch of people to say "Really?" and go check, but it's for real. In several years of using Gmail, I never felt the need. Search always found what I wanted. I mentioned this to some people in my office and they were similarly stunned that they never noticed.

One curmudgeonly former Outlook jockey said that he's missed that feature forever. shrug. When I used to use Outlook on an Exchange server, search frequently didn't find messages that I already had open! They were just missing from the index, word stemming didn't work, or one of many other problems. Also, I used to hit my storage quota and have to sort by size to delete offending large attachments. Never have any of those problems with Gmail, so why would I need sort?

Last time I checked, gmail doesn't do word stemming either, or substring matches.

Very interesting findings. But, can you imagine the author explaining something more complicated?

My thoughts exactly. I was expecting some revolutionary design with the size of the article and the number of images involved.

Note that I am not saying this is a negative at all. I just found it out of the ordinary and not expected. Although, if the target audience was HN, then there was definitely a lot of wasted effort. :)

Applications are becoming like furniture. We live in them.

It's working looking in gruesome detail at how efficient and comfortable a given app is.

Yes, and he would succeed in style. I'm reminded of Sipser's intro to theory of computation: lots of images paint a very clear picture. Much clearer than when you would find yourself forced to draw all those images yourself (which you simply wouldn't do and you would instead settle for thinking you understood it). This is much simpler, but there are enough folks for which it is equally hard as intro to ToC was the first time for CS geeks.

Perhaps you're right. But I think that the article could be summed up in a few bullet points without losing detail.

On a related note, I feel like the iPhone is less "eager" to rotate after being held in the same orientation for a while. E.g. I browse Safari in landscape mode for ten minutes, rotate the phone to portrait, and it takes a few extra seconds for the transition to register.

Anybody else noticed this?

I keep rotation locked. Can't stand it. I was very happy to see the rotation lock with ios 4, it was very difficult reading in bed before.

I think my iPhone's rotation algorithm is this:

When I want it to not rotate, it rotates anyway. I must then fuddle with the multitasking bar to hit the Lock Orientation button.

When I want it to rotate, it seems to take ages before it rotates. Or, I forget that I have rotation lock on, and then have to turn it off first.

That was quite a long write-up for something that I thought was obvious just from using the iPhone for a bit of time.

Great insight into a UI so good nobody will ever notice it (not being sarcastic there). Reminds me of your awesome post on the tab resizing UI for Google Chrome. Well done!

I really wish Gwibber would learn that lesson.

hmm, this is why I never scroll in big lists: just search.

the phone only caches about 100 emails per inbox anyway, so odds on the email just isn't there by scrolling. searching will go and fetch older ones from the server too, and the results sit there (new emails or no) until you're done with them.

Swell. Doesn't stop me from flying into a rage when it decides it's time to delete (not archive, mind you, delete) everything from my inbox without warning despite the 6+ gigs i have free on the device. Thanks Mail App. Go f*ck yourself.

Sounds more like another POP3 mail application downloading and deleting your messages, AFAIK Mail.app never deletes messages in any Inbox regardless of available space. So either that, or you've hit a very rare bug since deleting peoples inboxes would be headline news on par with the Android SMS bug.

i did this in the chat view for messageparty :) if (!isScrolledUp)

This is why there's a sentence on page 41 of the User Experience book I'm reading which reads "Apple, Apple, Apple, iPod, iPod, iPod, iPhone, iPhone, iPhone[1]."

Any good UX culture should catch these kinds of details and implement them right, the problem is the lack of good UX cultures beyond a couple prominent examples.

[1]Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com