Android Notification Icons
Stuyvesant Parker:
I admit, a bar full of icons can be ugly. It reminds some of us of Windows’ pre-installed bloatware from PC manufacturers: having a task tray full of ugly icons that either do nothing or actively signal something is running that is probably taxing your system. In most cases on Windows, they are to be eradicated.
What’s unfair on Android is to assume those icons are “junk” and are not put there by the user.
Personally, I’d love to be able to have notification icons on iOS. But. I don’t see Apple ever implementing that because it can’t be done elegantly - at least, not according to me thinking about it for the past minute and a half. This is the major difference I see between iOS and Android - one is about sleek usability for the technopeasants, the other is about control and power.
The Windows task tray is an apt analogy to make. The first image looks like garbage (and, point of contention, that user is Korean, not a “l33t Chinese hax0r”) but may be hugely useful to that person. The Nexus One notification icons look nice and unintrusive. They’re consistent and neat. But if you gave a hundred people a hundred Android phones, how many would have notification trays that looked like that?
Parker asks, “Tell me, just by looking at my iPhone, how many notifications I have:” and then posts a picture of the status bar, following up with, “You can see that I’m listening to music, and you can see that I’m connected to Wifi and that I’m using Sprint.” This is circular logic at its finest. If I wanted to see how many notifications I had on my iPhone, I’d look at my lockscreen or my notifications tray. You can’t argue that iPhone needs notifications in the status bar because it doesn’t have notifications in the status bar and it should have notifications in the status bar.
You can’t see that I have unread email waiting for me. You can’t see that Tiny Tower is bugging me about restocking. You can’t see AppsGoneFree notifying me that my daily free app report is ready, nor that my girlfriend instant messaged me 5 minutes ago and I never responded.
“I’m not looking at my notifications, and I can’t see any notifications.” Sorry if that’s a bit too much strawman, but that’s pretty much what that amounts to.
Are iOS notifications perfect? Far from it. Generally speaking, I only use the lockscreen for notifications; rare is the time when I pull down the tray to check unless I’m just clearing up junk for OCD purposes. Are they functional? Barely. At least it’s not the terrible system that used to exist pre-iOS5.
To be honest, I’d rather have a visible light, BlackBerry-style, than notifications in my status bar. Mine’s pretty full already - there’s little to no space for additions. From right to left: Signal strength, Carrier, Wi-Fi, (Space), Time, (Space), Orientation Lock, Bluetooth, Battery Percentage, Battery Icon. There’s space for two more icons without it becoming cluttered, four if you want it to look terrible.
Don’t get me wrong - notification icons would be great. It just wouldn’t work the way iOS is set up now. Android is better built to suit them, and that’s great. Users can get at-a-glance information of changes and updates. Cool.
How would I do it on iOS? For one, I’d change the notification tray from “pull down” to “push up”, coming from the bottom of the screen. Then I’d make a bottom-aligned widget about the size of the current Weather one that was customizable with apps, actions, updates, and so forth. It wouldn’t be quite as passive and at-a-glance as having it in the status bar (this way would require at least one action; possibly more if the phone is locked, but the widget should display on the lockscreen as well) but it’d be functional and non-disruptive of the current iOS setup.
Also, a completely off-topic gripe: this guy naming his tumblr “johngruber” and using the Daring Fireball logo is totally misleading, even if he has his name in the About section. It should be called something more like “reactionstogruber”.
