It’s a list of missed notifications that can be conveniently accessed with a single swipe from anywhere on the operating system. This, in short, is how Notification Center works. The list of notifications can be scrolled Notification Center is based on Apple’s “linen” texture that the company has made popular in previous versions of iOS, and OS X Lion. Either by proving that iOS was still the best mobile OS on the planet, or because of an effective personal need for something better among Apple executives themselves, Notification Center was born. With such a huge market for push notifications and apps that can integrate with them, the frustration of users annoyed by the modal alerts associated to notifications started to resonate with Apple. And it’s not like Apple didn’t notice the explosion in popularity for push notification-based features in third-party apps: at the WWDC in June, Apple’s Scott Forstall said that over 100 billion push notifications had been sent to date. There are apps that alert us of new podcast episodes, and utilities to connect the Mac with iOS devices through Growl and push notifications. The notification system Apple built with iPhone OS 1.0 couldn’t keep up with the evolution of apps and the data streams created by developers over time – these days, we have apps that send us notifications for new tweets and text messages – fairly average alerts you might argue – but we have notifications for missed video call invitations and breaking news, too. A mobile OS should keep notifications accessible and contextual, not invisible and disconnected. Notifications should alert, not interrupt. They are multiple boxes to dismiss one after the other. If you unlock your iPhone after a few hours and you have multiple notifications, they’re not “grouped”. You can’t get a list of “past notifications”. You can’t save a pre-iOS 5 notification “for later”. Which, by the way, forces you to immediately confirm an action that’s usually only given “OK” and “Cancel” options. The app you were previously interacting with, in fact, “stops working” the moment you receive a modal notification. On mobile devices, being interrupted by a notification is annoying because you can’t look away and ignore it. Plus, iOS is not the Mac and, if anything, OS X had to learn a few things from its little iPad brother with Lion. But on the Mac, alerts and dialog boxes aren’t really push notifications, and they’re easily dismissible or ignorable. This happens on the Mac every day: dialog boxes ask us to confirm file deletion, mounted DMGs – they even inform us of upcoming Calendar events. Apple was actually pretty proud of the modal nature of notifications – a dialog box would pop up on screen without covering the main view (an app, the Springboard), thus allowing the user to keep seeing what was going behind the alert. The old notifications were modal and disruptive. So Apple came to the point where notifications needed to change. The old notifications were built for a different set of apps.Īs the App Store changed and, ultimately, led Apple’s growth in the mobile app ecosystem, the notification system built by Apple in 2007 with the original iPhone started to not only show the proverbial signs of time, but to annoy users as well. And by “became” I mean that they began to show their utter nature of a system built for non-connected applications as soon as the App Store turned into a platform for the always-on individual who’s constantly connected, even when he plays Angry Birds or is eating a new meal at a restaurant a friend suggested. Criticized both by the tech press and average users alike, the old notifications had, really, one main problem: they became annoying with time. Looking at Notification Center now – and playing with it for at least a day – it’s clear the system is indisputably better than what we used to have on our devices in the pre-iOS 5 era. There is no doubt Notification Center is among the most anticipated new functionalities to land on iOS, but before we delve deeper into its advantages over the old notification system of iOS 4.x and its (very few) shortcomings, here’s a bit of background history that should better put Notification Center into context. Notification Center is one of the key features of iOS 5, one that will profoundly change the way iPhone and iPad users approach the incoming stream of data and notifications on mobile devices.
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