Notification Center is a way to collect all your widgets and alerts all in one place.
Since its debut in iOS 5, Apple has included first-party widgets, removed them, then added support for third-party widgets. Apple has added a missed tab and then taken it away. Apple has added predictive widgets — Notification Center can now tell you how long it will take to get to your next likely destination — but they haven’t expanded on the concept. Apple also added Control Center to iOS 7. Instead of bundling toggles sliders, buttons, and shortcuts into the top-down Notification Center, they created a new, separate bottom-up drawer instead.
iOS 8 did a lot of clean up, and added the ‘edit’ mechanism so you could add and manage Today view widgets, but what else would you like to see Apple do with Notification Center in iOS 9?
- Clear all button at the top
- Super-swipe to clear notification with one gesture (like Mail)
- Reliably clear notifications when alerts are viewed in-app.
- Collapse multiple similar notifications into a group that can be expanded
- Double tap notification to pin and highlight
- Tap and hold notification to set Reminder
- Sort by priority (based on system-wide VIP)
- Show recent Siri results
- More predictive widgets
- System-level widget collapse/expand control
The Apple Watch is going to change the way many of us interact with notifications, moving the banners from the pocket to the wrist, but for anything we miss, Notification Center’s dropdown might become even more important.
So, if Apple asked you what you’d like them to put on the bulletin board for Notification Center in iOS 9, what would you say?