iOS notification design is kind of hideous
Ok, after some amount of time to mull on it, the notification design in iOS 5 is kind of disconcerting. Ie, not that nice looking. Not talking about the linen textures, but some of the animation designs and the information display.
Take a look:
There are a few nice things. The "slide right to go the app" is a nice idea on the lockscreen for instance.
But there a few janky things to some of the animation design the information display. In essence, the design breaks the visual design philosophy in iOS where one is moving things as if it was a piece of paper. In iOS 4, when one double-clicks the home button, the multitasking tray does really pop up. What happens is the app or home screen moves up and reveals the multitasking tray. iOS 4 preserves the screen of the app or home screen and animates it up. When one taps an app folder, iOS 4 slices the home screen in two and moves the two parts away and reveals what's inside the app folder. Same thing happens in iOS 5 with the News Stand folder. This animation design is elegant and for the lack of a better word, iOS like.
For notifications in iOS 5, I'm sure there was no clean way to do it well. The flip animation for one notification chops a part of the current screen off and replaces it with the notification. It looks rather weird, and even weirder on the iPad. I'm not sure of a better way to do this. It's supposed to be a passive display mechanism, letting you work with the current app, yet it chops part of the that app off. All options I can think of are rather unsavory, so maybe this is the only way it can be done.
The pull-down drawer of notifications however, that I think can be improved by employing moving the current screen down along with the notification drawer.
Lastly, the height of the notifications in the lockscreen and pull-down drawer are too short. I'd like it to be the same height as the "slide to unlock" button.
So, change the animation in the pull down drawer to more like what's seen in folders/multitasking tray, increase the height of the stacked notifications, and I don't quite know what to do with single notifications. Maybe a semi-transperent thing, something with a transparency gradient from opaque at the edge to transparent at the bottom.
Take a look:
There are a few nice things. The "slide right to go the app" is a nice idea on the lockscreen for instance.
But there a few janky things to some of the animation design the information display. In essence, the design breaks the visual design philosophy in iOS where one is moving things as if it was a piece of paper. In iOS 4, when one double-clicks the home button, the multitasking tray does really pop up. What happens is the app or home screen moves up and reveals the multitasking tray. iOS 4 preserves the screen of the app or home screen and animates it up. When one taps an app folder, iOS 4 slices the home screen in two and moves the two parts away and reveals what's inside the app folder. Same thing happens in iOS 5 with the News Stand folder. This animation design is elegant and for the lack of a better word, iOS like.
For notifications in iOS 5, I'm sure there was no clean way to do it well. The flip animation for one notification chops a part of the current screen off and replaces it with the notification. It looks rather weird, and even weirder on the iPad. I'm not sure of a better way to do this. It's supposed to be a passive display mechanism, letting you work with the current app, yet it chops part of the that app off. All options I can think of are rather unsavory, so maybe this is the only way it can be done.
The pull-down drawer of notifications however, that I think can be improved by employing moving the current screen down along with the notification drawer.
Lastly, the height of the notifications in the lockscreen and pull-down drawer are too short. I'd like it to be the same height as the "slide to unlock" button.
So, change the animation in the pull down drawer to more like what's seen in folders/multitasking tray, increase the height of the stacked notifications, and I don't quite know what to do with single notifications. Maybe a semi-transperent thing, something with a transparency gradient from opaque at the edge to transparent at the bottom.