The new Notification Center in iOS5 is a massive improvement over the modal only notifications of all previous iOS incarnations. It really is so much better, but there is room for improvement!
Ben Brooks has written a really great overview of some of the issues with Notification Center in a piece entitled “The Annoyment Center”. I’m not sure I’d go as far as to call it annoying but I do agree with a lot of what he writes:
First every calendar that is in the Calendar app on iOS is shown in the notification center — your only options about this is to turn all off, or limit the amount shown. One would think this is ideal, but what if — like me — you subscribe to a calendar for your golf club that has multiple events every day?
Now, I neither play golf or subscribe to remote calendars, but I do have quite a few calendars that I don’t want polluting my lock screen. I’d love to see some simple interface to be able to select which calendars appear in the Notification Center.
All of this really leads to the most annoying part of the new Notification Center: the fact that there is no indication, or notification anywhere that there are still notifications in the Notification Center.
The core function of a notification is to notify you of things. Notification Center doesn’t seem to understand this concept.
Now this is the biggie! Its great that notifications now get out of my way and don’t interfere with what I’m doing with my phone. It used to be that once dismissed they were gone for good and I’d have to remember to action them. Now they are all stored in a single place, which is great, but Ben is right that you still need to remember to do something to check what notifications are waiting for you.
It would be great to have a small icon in the status bar, having not played with iOS5 until a couple of days ago I had anticipated this would have been the case. The new ‘sync’ icon that appeared in the status bar of iOS5 is a good example, because its animated it catches your eye but not in a way that would be a constant distraction from your main task. Maybe a small pulsing circle would be a suitable indication?
Reeder also features an animated icon when its downloading assets. It does cover the battery icon, which wouldn’t be appropriate for the Notification Center, but because its dynamic it catches the eye and informs you that something is taking place.
I wouldn’t want to go back to pre-iOS5 notifications but I’m looking forward to a few small tweaks to improve on what we now have!
