Notified and iOS5

You probably know that on monday Apple announced a new notification system at WWDC.

As some of you pointed out, it looks a lot like Notified: pull-down drawer, notification bar, etc., some of you even said that Apple had ripped me off.

I don’t feel that way.

For starters, the drawer idea wasn’t that new, Android had it before Notified, and while I never used it personally, the concept was a big inspiration.
(It did come as a surprise that they used the swipe down gesture, with the rumor of they hiring Peter Hajas, I thought they were going with the notification list above the multitasking drawer)

As for Notification Bar, I didn’t see anything like that before Notified, but it’s not a terrible innovating idea; instead of showing the notification at the middle of the screen, try to move it to somewhere less important.

So yeah, I would have loved if Apple had sent me an email saying “Hey, we love your notification system, come work with us”, but you can’t always get what you want.

Anyway, many of you were left wondering what was gonna happen with Notified.
I don’t want it to end as a beta, so I’ll try to push a release as soon as I can, but I won’t work too hard on new features.

I also find it really cool that Apple made a system so similar to Notified, because it means we were doing it right.

We’ve had a great run, and I hope you all enjoyed Notified like I did, and I want to thank you for all your support.

Notified Beta Update

I just uploaded a new beta of Notified which includes:

  • Changed “Auto Delete on Badge Reset” to “Auto Delete on “Application Launch”, changed the way it works to, hopefully, avoid lockups of devices.
  • Improved the Notification Bar plugin to honor the “Custom Icons” setting.

Please continue to report bugs.

Thanks.

Notified 2 Beta Update

I just uploaded an update to the Notified Beta Repo, most of the changelog is here. But a couple things I didn’t mentioned before were also added:

  • An option was added to delete all the notifications of an application when it’s badge reaches 0. It’s under “Auto Delete”, and it’s off by default
  • The API was improved, send me an email if you want a header with the current API. I’ll upload it to github when my computer stops being picky.

If you don’t know how to get the beta, go here.

Upcoming update for Notified 2 Beta

I’m almost done with a new update for the Notified 2 Beta, but since Safari decided it wouldn’t let me download properly the Linux image I needed to rebuild the repo index on a virtual machine, all I can give you right now is a change log:

  • iOS3 code was removed, reducing the file size of the dylib by ~17kb (almost 10%!)
  • Auto Delete is no longer a switch, but a menu with 3 options: none, single (deletes only the tapped notification) and group (deletes all notifications in the group of the tapped notification).
  • When custom icons are off, the header cells are a little smaller and the icon is now pixel perfect (29x29, I was stretching them to 32x32), you might realize how seriously we take the looks of Notified ;)
  • The “Show Old” button was improved: It now says “Show Older”, it has a new size, and a new pixel-perfect new blue button.
  • When custom icons were on, all applications would have the generic push icon, that was fixed and now they should show their custom icon.
  • A “Choose Gestures” option was added to the options, it let’s you choose which gestures should open Notified a little easier.
  • Statusbar icons were all removed except for the ‘!’, which was brought back. This is because the Statusbar icons package will be extended and offered as a separate package, probably free for Notified costumers.
  • I’m also looking into fixing the Default Alerts Blocker.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get this update uploaded today (March 15).

We’re preparing a beta

After a while of being too busy to work on Notified, I was finally able to make some substantial progress on something I started and never finished.

The first feature you will see on the beta is that now, the notifications will carry the information they received and when the app is launched it will open with that information passed to it, that means that if you get an IM, your IM app will open in that conversation.

At first, that will happen only when you tap the notification, I’ll see if holding that information longer doesn’t cause any problems, and if it doesn’t, the information could be kept on the notifications list.

Another feature (you won’t see), it’s an under the hood improvement to the way the window is managed, this will help when adding live pull-down, which I’m working on (with help from Ryan Petrich, developer of Activator, since this requires some changes to Activator too).

I’m looking into adding some other features based on your feedback, too, and I’m also working with Daniel Zimmerman to get the mail notifications polished up and bug-free.

This beta will be held on MacThemes and I’ll announce via twitter when it’s available, so follow me. I still need to test a few things myself and improve the current plugins to handle the new notifications, but it shouldn’t take long.

Notified Pro + Mail

As some of you might have noticed, the mail integration of Notified Pro has a few flaws. Basically, for some people it crashes the Mail app when receiving new mails.

I’ve been looking into this, but as I have never experienced it myself, it’s a little harder to fix.

[dev stuff] For the 1.5 release of Notified Pro, I added a few lines of code to make sure none of the objects I used got released while I was trying to use them, but I’m not sure if it helped[/dev stuff]

So, what’s the next step?

Yesterday I separated the mail integration of Notified into a separated dylib for two reasons: a) You can disable it definitely with SBSettings or SSH b) That way I can leave the code that logs useful information for a fix on, without having the main code of notified log it’s stuff.

This update will also have a new attempt for a fix.

This will be available tomorrow or Monday, and I hope that, if there are still crashes, you’ll send me some crash reports (search for Crash Reporter on Cydia) to get this working flawlessly asap.

Once I get this fixed I’m gonna be able to move into implementing new cool features for Notified Pro.