[General Topics] eaglesteve:
Notification and "widget" like information on iPhone

Talking about widgets on iPhone is difficult because they are so many choices available. I'll first very briefly list some of them to provide some flavor in this post. Which one a user decide to choose depends on his own philosophy on what a widget should be I guess, and there are probably as many type of widgets as there are philosophy.

On the next post, I'll talk about my own philosophy on what a widget and notification system should do in order to increase productivity, and how mine customization looks like.

There are many different "systems or frameworks for managing widgets" (not sure if I'm using the right word here) available. Within each system/framework, you will find widgets made to work on that systems. There are just about uncountable number of widgets already available in Cydia, most of them are free, some are available very cheap. Playing with them alone could take months ensuring you never get bored with iPhone.

Here are some of the systems/frameworks:

A.Smartscreen widget.

B. QuickWidgets

There are very similar to each other so I list them together.

This works on the LOCKSCREEN and the demo only show a few widgets, but many many more widgets are available. Users could go to Cydia to install any additional widgets they like. A few widgets could fit into one screen, or occupy the entire screen. Installing this will make the lock screen multipage, and users swipe to the pages exactly like the way they do in Sense UI, but there is no pinching zooming to bring up the helicopter view and jump to any of the pages.

The version in this video is the beta version and made quite a while ago. Now it is no longer in beta stage, so a lot more features have been added, but this video is adequate to give an idea of these two widget systems.

[youtube]4XTnnkUjnO8[/youtube]

C. Intelliscreen. Again puts informations which users like to quickly access on the lockscreen itself. It also incorporates alerts and notification on the taskbar.

[youtube]wHUx0he4_D4[/youtube]

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THESE WIDGETS?

For me, they are very Smartscreen and Quickwidgets are some some poor imitation of the widgets that HTC has in the Sense UI. There are some limited animation but not nearly as sexy as HTC's. So in terms of demonstration, they look pale in comparision However, function wise, they're quite close.

It has certain advantages over HTC's design concept though. The primary one is the fact that it is on the lockscreen itself. If we think about the purpose of widgets, they are suppose to let user get FASTER access to these information, mostly starting from the point when the phone is switched off. For this reason, my opinion is that the ability to do so without even having to go pass the lockscreen is certainly preferable. Once passed the lockscreen, I personally would prefer to use the real applications itself for most of the task as task switching using the real applications (instead of widgets) is supported with the normal task switcher (whereas widgets are not supported), and real applications are far richer in functions and a lot more user friendly than widgets.

The only widget that I would continue to use after passing the lockscreen is one which gives me a quick access to all the notifications and all the key info that I frequently like to know from anywhere in the system. In this aspect, both HTC and the above widgets do not do a good job. It is simply too cumbersome to have to navigate back to either the desktop or go back to the lockscreen to view critical information of interest at a glance. I will talk about what these "quick information at a glace" are in the next post.