Statusbar plugin top; Notification Bar bottom
It’s only been two weeks since the Cydia release of Notified for the iPhone, but the core app and extensions have come quite a long way. The free app started the whole process off by providing a notification hub. It wasn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it was a nice change of pace, especially for users who receive frequent push notifications. Then Notified Pro ($2.99) hit the Cydia Store on August 5th and allowed users to call down a MobileSubstrate (MS) extension from any screen. This made the basic idea behind Notified even more tangible, but it wasn’t until the plugins started landing on Cydia that the whole concept really came into its own.
Notification Bar and Statusbar Notifications are now available for free to Notified Pro users, and they’re pretty damn amazing.
Setup
To make sure the plugins work as intended, turn off the pop-up alerts in the Notified settings. Launch the Notified app -> Settings -> Manage Alerts, and then make sure that you don’t show alerts on the Springboard or Lockscreen.
You’ll then need to download either of the plugins from Cydia and maybe even perform a respring before they start working. You could install both sets of plugins as I did, but it gets annoying very quickly, and I only did it because going into Cydia to install and uninstall the plugins was such a pain.
Notification Bar for Notified
This was the first of the Notified plugins, and while it’s technically the most functional, I like the newer Status Bar notifications more. Notification Bars look a bit like the notifications on the Palm Pre, except they don’t move the whole screen upwards, and they’re not quite as flexible.
Notifications show up as translucent bars along the bottom of the screen. Tapping on the icon will launch the relevant app, tapping on the x will dismiss the app, and tapping anywhere else on the bar will bring up the MS extension of Notified (the big ol’ notifications drawer).
There are still numerous bugs related with the Notification Bar, but none of them are real show stoppers, and they can usually be fixed with a quick respring. The strangest bug I’ve seen thus far is the one that makes the Notification pop-ups climb higher and higher up the screen. They’re supposed to display only along the bottom of the screen, but sometimes they can get as high as the halfway point of the device.
Statusbar Notifications
Statusbar notifications simply draw themselves right over the status bar of your iPhone. They’re dismissed with a tap, and can also summon the MS Extension when you swipe over the status bar in any direction (I find “pulling down” easiest).
I absolutely love these Statusbar notifications and think they truly turn Notified into a killer set of apps and extensions for the iPhone. The only thing that needs ironing out are a few bugs that have to do with how the plugin is displayed. Notifications always display in portrait mode (even if you’re in landscape), and sometimes they don’t show at all. I’ve submitted a bug report on the Notified Wiki and am hoping the developer can get to it soon.
Notified: usable right now
I’ve always been excited about the wealth of possibilities behind the Notified concept (it’s taken months to get this release out the door), but it’s only in the last few days that the app has blossomed from a great concept, into a usable set of apps, plugins, and extensions.
There are definitely more bugs to squash, and the UI could definitely be a little friendlier (plugins have to be installed or de-activated through Cydia, and they have no settings of their own), but Notified has kicked so much ass thus far, that I have faith that fixes and improvements are coming soon. I also really hope that this whole system takes off, since this really is how Apple should have handled notifications on iOS.
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