What’s missing from this picture?
Quite some time ago, Apple introduced Notification Centre on iOS. With iOS 5 and its many other updates, the advancement of the notification system was one of the ones that was most important to me personally.
The management of information coming in to my iDevices was welcome relief from what had come four operating systems before. At the time though, I did note that it was still far from perfect. Many people complain that the buttons for clearing the notifications are too small and fickle. Not to mention that it’s a two stage process and there’s no clear all option.
All of this I can live with, but there is one thing that get’s to me and has since the inclusion of Notification Centre. I think that it may irritate many people, but it wont untill its pointed out to them. If you have an iDevice, take a second, wake it up and tell me, do you have any notifications waiting for you? Go on, slide to unlock, any idea if you have any un-seen notifications? You may have number badges on some apps, but if you have many home screens you can’t see the badges. If there was a notification on the lock screen, it’s gone now. You’re going to have to slide down from the top of the screen to see if you have any notifications!
It’s really annoying when you’ve missed something because it’s been buried in the notification center. All it would take is a very simple fix. A little badge at the top of the screen to tell you have notifications. Hell, this has been on Android from the beginning, why is it not in iOS?
So then, I’m going to email this to Apple and hope they address it. If it gets to you to, please share this page and hopefully, we can get someone’s attention about this simple omission from the worlds best mobile OS.
Bellow are some simple mock ups to show how a possible implementations of this could go. This method uses a counter similar to the app badges, but there could be anything really, like a unopend email symbol or an apple logo with out the bit and it gets bitten as you read the notifications!
