Posts Tagged ‘notifications’

What webOS did better…

Having recently upgraded from a Palm Pixi to a iPhone 4S, leaving behind webOS for iOS, it’s easy to find many things that are vastly superior on iOS; not surprising, given the superior hardware on the iPhone and the relative maturity of iOS as a platform. However, I find myself missing a few things I’ve become accustomed to with webOS; things I think webOS simply did a better job at.

Notifications
While both platform alert you to events, webOS also kept notifications stacked on the bottom of the display until you chose to swipe them away.

notifications

Integrated Contacts
webOS automatically imported and linked contacts from multiple sources (Facebook, Gmail, etc.) making it fairly simple to manage (or more accurately, not have to manage) an address book.

integrated contacts

Multitasking
While iOS supports multitasking on a technical level, on a UI/UX level the focus is very much centered on one app at a time, as swapping between apps always requires a trip back to the home screen. The webOS process of sliding between cards was not only a slightly faster method to swap between apps but also fairly convenient when it came to glancing at something in another app and then getting back to what you were doing; the scenario that pops into my mind is texting something from a webpage but not remembering it exactly or entirely, and having to swap between the messaging app and the browser.

Also, swiping a card up and off the screen was a fairly elegant way to close it. Exiting apps is perhaps not a big of a deal on an iPhone due to the larger memory pool, but when you do near the memory limit, I’m not sure double tapping the home button, pressing and holding the app icon, and hitting the remove icon is the easiest nor most intuitive action.

multitasking

jxNotify

I made a little JavaScript notification system, somewhat inspired by webOS and also by the type of notifications you see on Gmail.

jxNotify code

The central idea was to have an elegant system that could sensibly display the progress of AJAX operations; meaning notifications stays up while the operation is being done (i.e. while sending request and waiting for a reply from the server), then a success or failure message is posted upon completion, which fades away automatically.

While designed for AJAX calls, this could certainly be used in other cases as well.

jxNotify notifyPre

jxNotify notifyPostError


Initializing

// optional argument = icon, recommended size of 18x18
jxNotify.init('jx-notify.content/sdotspott-notify-icon.png');


Notify of operation in progress (notifyPre)

jxNotify.notifyPre('doing stuff...');


Notify of operation completed (notifyPost)

jxNotify.notifyPost('finished!');


Notify of operation failure (notifyPostError)

jxNotify.notifyPostError('something bad happened!');