iPhone and iPad notifications used to be limited to just pop-ups on the home screen, lock screen, and inside of apps. Then iOS 5 came along late last year and gave users many more options, including an Android-like Notification Center, five-second banners as alternatives to pop-ups, and great new slide-to-unlock notifications on the lock screen. […]
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How We Use Notifications on iOS 5

Feb 5th 2012 by

iPhone and iPad notifications used to be limited to just pop-ups on the home screen, lock screen, and inside of apps. Then iOS 5 came along late last year and gave users many more options, including an Android-like Notification Center, five-second banners as alternatives to pop-ups, and great new slide-to-unlock notifications on the lock screen.

In fact, Apple gave users a surprising amount of control over notifications in iOS 5 – enough so that one iPhone can function very differently from another, depending on the way that users have set up the flow of notifications. Our iSource team has a pretty varied set of workflows on the iPhone and iPad, so this weekend we pooled some ideas and thought we’d share how we all choose to work with (or without) notifications on iOS 5.

Jay Roth

Like everyone else, I was extremely excited to see iOS 5 create the Notification Center. I had been using the jailbreak Intelliscreen as my equivalent on the lock screen and grew extremely fond of glancing at my iPhone to see what deserved my attention, particularly with regard to the weather, texts, and email, and going directly to the app from a locked iPhone.

Apple iOS 5’s Notification Center is a definite improvement over nothing at all, but for me, I think Apple has missed the purpose in execution. With Intelliscreen, everything unread remained on the lock screen until I read and cleared it in the app. Apple’s Notification Center on the lock screen clears after a single unlock. In a normal operating environment, I have to manually pull down the Notification Center to see what needs my attention – a pretty useless step to me, unless Im’ checking to see the weather forecast.

So what does the translate into? Despite the best aspect, Banner announcements, I personally want the Notification Center to more permanently announce on my lock screen what deserves my attention so I can choose whether to unlock. Since I use badges – mail, text, phone, and a few apps (like Words with Friends, and the terribly inaccurate FaceBook) – I don’t really see the point of it when my phone is unlocked.

Rob Renk

I was very happy to see Notification Center as part of iOS 5.  I love the idea, and I have always felt that this was one area where other operating systems had the upper hand over iOS.  I’m not saying it is perfect now, but at the very least it is moving in the right direction.

When I first set up Notifications I didn’t really discriminate at all.  I left everything in there, and I selected to sort my Apps by time instead of manually, and I allowed badges for everything as well.  The only thing I insisted was for my alerts to be in the Banner style–I mean that was the point, right? We wanted notifications that were less disruptive, and didn’t force you to address them in order to continue what you were doing, if you didn’t want to.

I really liked MobileNotifier by Peter Hajas.  I had been following his work and had MobileNotifier installed on my jailbroken phone. I was encouraged when it was rumored that he’d be joining Apple, as I had hopes for a similar implementation.  From what I can tell, that was what we got in the end.

As time went by, I have definitely trimmed down the apps that I allow in Notification Center.  I mean, really, do I need Infinity Blade to send me notifications–or most any other game for that matter? Now with the recent iPhone 4S/iPad 2 JB tool Absinthe, the sky is the limit.  I am really excited/encouraged by what I have seen thus far.  Once again, leave it to the jailbreak community of creative minds to show us how much potential the iPhone really has.

Patrick Jordan

Like most iOS users (I would guess), I was very happy to see Notification Center come along in iOS 5 to make our lives considerably easier when dealing with notifications. I know it’s still far from perfect, but it’s light years better than what we had before. Speaking of which, I only allow alerts for FaceTime, Phone, and Calendar – as they are still stupid looking and bring back memories of the bad old days.

I allow badges for a whole bunch of apps mainly because I’m just too lazy to go in and toggle them off. Instacast currently has a daunting 71 in its badge as a result of my laziness and the fact that I haven’t caught up with podcasts in a while.

I try to manage which apps can show banners in Notification Center fairly well, as I really like it and when it gets too cluttered it detracts from that. So right now I allow Boxcar, a few good news apps, Instacast, Mail, and a few other stragglers (that may need further weeding out soon) to show up in Notification Center.

I hope Apple will keep refining and improving notifications in iOS, but I’m not holding my breath on that.

Brandon Steili

That should pretty much sum up how I use notification center: I get text messages (banner), emails (banner) and calendar events (alert) and a couple of others important ones, but pretty much everything else that wants to send me a notification can kick rocks [Editor’s Note: presumably without shoes on]. I’ve got enough to deal with on a daily basis that the last thing I want is some app deciding it needs to send me a notification about some trivial accomplishment I’ve missed in Game Center (an app that I wish I could delete).

I guess it’s because of this aversion to notifications and annoyances that I pretty much never use Notification Center. I heard my phone bing -I know I have email. I heard a pair of bings (calypso) so I know I received text messages. I don’t really need to waste time unlocking, sliding the panel down, tapping an email, and then waiting while it zips over to Mail.app. Instead, I unlock, go to email, and I’m Done!

With that in mind, I am actually looking forward to jailbreaking again – for LockInfo (or a similar app) which is what I wish Apple would have given us in the first place. If Apple is going to insist upon the lockscreen being a waste of time that could have useful information on it, the least they could do was allow some widgets to be made available for Notification Center. That way it could something useful besides get in the way of Flight Control’s planes coming in from the top of the screen.

Thomas Wong

I like to manage my notifications differently on the iPhone and iPad.

The iPhone functions as my audio alert for most everything from lock screen notifications to Facebook and Words with Friends pop-ups. Very few notifications are actually turned off so that I can simply look at my iPhone’s Notification Center and catch up with most everything I may have missed while walking around. The one exception to this is e-mail, which I have permanently silenced. The only place that my e-mail shows up in is Notification Center and the Mail app, and I find I’m far less distracted by my inbox as a result. I realize that others may not have this luxury due to storms of urgent e-mails, but this setup has worked out very well for me.

My iPad, in comparison, is relatively distraction-free. I get a few banner notifications for iMessages and Beejive instant messages, and I also see the five most recent e-mails inside of the Notification Center, but for the most part my iPad feels much more like a one-task machine. Turning off the majority of the Notification Center switches to OFF has been particularly effective, and I now deal with far fewer duplicate notifications on the iPad and iPhone.

Notifications on iOS 5 aren’t perfect (that’s something that pretty much everyone on the team has said), but they’re now good enough that I no longer think about jailbreaking for utilities like LockInfo and Notifier Pro.

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