Before I jump in, yes I realize this is my 4th or 5th post and it's the second one about the damn iPhone. Well, this is mostly because I own an iPhone, and as it's my only phone I use it a lot during the day and I think about ways to fix the annoyances that ultimately come up with it. I have a feeling if I had any other smartphone, I'd be writing similarly about it. Or to put it another way, no I'm not an Apple fan boy.
My biggest complaint: the iPhone notification system
This isn't a unique complain about the phone, but it is a big one and one that is easy to fix (or at least I think it is) without having to totally rework Apple's current design thinking. Before I get any nearer a solution, let's review the model I'm complaining about.
The iPhone offers notifications via one, all interrupting modal (aka popup) window. It doesn't matter what kind of notification it is or what application on the phone it's coming from. As the iPhone is essentially a unitasker (this has been discussed many other places, I'll come back and add links soon), this doesn't really feel out of place. Each window contains only one message, and to clear them you have to view them linearly, one at a time. It also interrupts everything else that's going on, unless it's a phone call. It's not great, but Cupertino thinks this is "the best" way to do it, and to some extent they're right. Here's why.
The iPhone, at it's core, is a phone. I know, shocking, it's only 5/6 of the products name, but don't feel bad about missing that, almost everyone has. Is it a mobile computing platform? Yes. Is it a media player? Yes. A portable gaming device? Yes. Is it an internet access point? Yes. You know what else does all those things? the iPod touch and the iPad. That functionality is what all the iOS devices share, but the thing that makes the iPhone different is the phone part. Without it, it's just an iPod touch (literally, remove the radios and it's the same damn thing.)
So, keeping the phone in mind what do you expect your phone to do? It's only job really is to ring when someone calls and then let the magic of telephone communications take place (in this case it has to do with radio waves, but that part of it isn't important.) In fact when it doesn't do that people get mad. If you don't believe me ask someone who spends any time in Manhattan and has an iPhone. But there are times when you don't want it to ring. When you don't want to see SMS messages, foursquare notifications, twitter notifications, or any other push notifications. There are times when you want to put the phone part of the phone on hold.
Apple was very smart here, because instead of their usual line of "we know best" they decided that the iPhone wouldn't be smart enough to decide when you didn't want your incoming communications front and center. This makes sense, your game of Plants vs Zombies isn't more important than a call from a family member most of the time. The phone simply just didn't have a way to prioritize it's core function, being a communications device, against everything else it can do. What they failed to do, as they have all across iOS, is let the user tell the iPhone what she wants.
The Solution: "iPhone, hold my calls."
Just like in the low tech days, when you didn't want to be bothered by the phone you simple made it not ring. This could mean something as simple as telling your assistant to hold you calls (if you're one of those lucky people with an assistant) or it could be as drastic as unplugging the phone from the wall. But you can't unplug you iPhone from the wall. Sure, you can put it in airplane mode, but what if you want to use the GPS? What if you still want the phone to ring, but you don't want all those popup notifications? What if you only want push notifications but not calls or SMS? Enter, Do not Disturb.
Add a new panel to the system settings, or a new app, to manage these Do not Disturb states. The light switch style on/off toggles are already a familiar element in the iOS UI. Lets just add 3 more that, when turned on hold your calls/sms/push. "Holding your calls" in this instance would really mean: sending phone calls straight to voicemail (a function that already exists in the OS and is mapped to the hardware lock button), and supressing the popup windows. This would solve the "oh man, I just got a text and it killed ______!" and it would do it in a way that doesn't totally alter the way Apple had envisioned the iPhone.
Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see an Android or webOS style notification system come to the iPhone, but I'm not holding my breath. In it's 4th major revision, iOS still doesn't even really support multitasking. The Do not Disturb model might serve as a nice compromise, at least until iOS9.
