IOS Notifications: No More, No Less

By jailbreaking iOS, one can significantly improve the notification experience by installing LockInfo and enabling its InfoShade option. Obviously this is far from a perfect or complete solution, but it's a step forward in the right direction.

A UI should follow the same rules of etiquette as human conversation - if it would be rude for a human to interrupt you constantly when you were trying to do something, it's just as bad for your UI to do it.

A good notification system needs to be context-aware, to realize that there's a difference between a device sitting idle on a desk or in your pocket, and a person playing a game, writing an email, or watching a video.

Even within apps, there should be context. I may be fine with an unobtrusive notification appearing when I'm reading an email, for example - but if I've got the keyboard up and I'm typing, don't place a button right where I was about to press a key, or shift the location of UI elements while I'm interacting with them.

The trouble with the iOS (and Mac & Windows, for that matter) approach to notifications is that they try to be "user friendly" when they should be "user subservient."

TFA suggests that a single icon/menu for all apps that have generated any notifications, in other words: all notifications appear in the same list.

This sounds like a bad idea to me:

First, you can't see at a glance whether you've just received a text message (something you might want to respond to immediately) or an email (which you don't immediately care about).

We would need a user to be able to control which apps can generate notifications. Otherwise every shovelware developer is going to want to put their crappy icon in that menu. And then we have the iOS equivalent of a Facebook news feed full of virtual farming updates!

Second, not all notifications are equal. On WebOS, a media player notification (new song is playing) is separate from the notification about how many texts are unread. A hundred texts can come in, and they won't bury the notification about the music playing.

I hope they start with the WebOS notification system and start improving.