Reinventing the Wheel with Notified for iPhone
If your jailbroken there are tons of apps, tweaks, mods and themes to choose from, but have you passed up one that might be too good to miss? Notified, available on the Cydia Store is reinventing the wheel with chrome rims with Notified for iPhone, a push notification app looking to give you information as quick and easy as possible.
Overview:
Notified keeps all of your information stored in one central location where you are free to see your list of apps and their notifications in chronological order. Also built into the app is a huge feature that allows minimalistic users to hide the alert boxes and just see the main sector of information. For example if Daniel added me on Facebook Notified would read “Daniel accepted your friend request,” with the above cell having the Facebook title and one notification available. However, if I were to hide that alert I would only see “Facebook” and the representation that I have 1 notification available, pretty neat huh?
Notified also allows you to clear your notifications list, collapse or expand all the tabs at once and even bookmark or delete certain notifications for future reference. The app also allows you to customize certain aspects to your liking such as the animations, badges, lock orientation and even the way you get alerts and where you want certain alerts to redirect to. For example, if I got a message from Facebook and I wanted Notified to redirect me to an alternative app such as Friends, that maybe didn’t have Push Notifications it could do that instead of opening up the traditional Facebook app.
We had some time to talk with the designer, Daniel Waldron about the app:
So, whose idea was it?
Mine. I saw the need for the app had some ideas how it should work then found Emillio who was one of the only devs I could find that was willing to tackle the project.
What was the thought process, both design and development aspects?
I had an idea of how it should look and work, I made mockups, we were in development for a while and we both collectively agreed that it was getting very heavy. We had support for theming and all kinds of stuff that we eventually decided wasn’t necessary. We scraped it and started from scratch taking the Apple approach to it. Making it clean and simple, in return keeping it light weight and snappy. We both bounced ideas off of each other throughout the whole process both in design and development.
Do you think Apple will eventually just recreate what you made?
From what I hear on the Apple rumor sites and everything right now, yes. I am not sure if it will be like how we did it, knowing Apple they might borrow some thoughts and ideas, but will create their own idea. It will probably be much better since they can write the OS around it greatly reducing the limitations that we have today
Was push notifications in native iOS “broken” to you or just not right?
Not broken, just not right. I think apple at the time thought that was the best way to present them without making them too cumbersome, but they weren’t thinking that users were soon going to have 20 apps on their device all throwing push notifications up all over their screen. I just felt that dismissing these popups because I was trying to write a message etc. was just getting out of control, because once dismissed that was it. Often when you would dismiss a notification it would be lost and gone forever. Forgotten. I wanted to change this and be able to look at the notifications on my own time, and have the ability to go back and look at past notifications as well.
Any other comments, Daniel?
I can comment on the design more than coding, but I really wanted to make something that would be similar in design and function to what Apple would do. Keep it clean, lightweight, and unobtrusive. The openness that Emillio and I had going into this project really benefited the app. We both got on the same page about the main objective very quickly and were very receptive to each others input and ideas about both the design and functionality. We constantly questioned each others thinking and didn’t take it personal at all. We were both very emotionally involved in the app and loved what we were making, I like to think that the passion and dedication put into the app shows. It really helped to make the app what it became, and made it better for everyone.
Thanks for your time Dan and thanks also to Emilio for helping create such a terrific app!
http://www.twitter.com/notifiedapp
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