iPhone Notification Thoughts

Apple created their Apple Push Notification system to allow applications to present information to the user, even when the applications are not running.  This helps reduces the amount of CPU usage on the phone, which will help prolong battery life

I would like to see a few things added to this:

• Better support for multiple notifications.  Currently only the last notification is shown. There are a few things that could be done
  
  
  
  1. Create a view that aggregates all of the new notifications since the user last looked at the phone
  
  
  2. Create a prioritization scheme that would make sure that the most important notifications are visible first
  
  
  3. Allow developers to expire previous notifications for their applications
  
  
  
  


• Support to send information back to developers.  Since using Apple's Push Notification requires  developers to have a server that keeps a persistent connection with Apple's servers.  This connection could be used to send information from about the iPhone back to developers
  
  
  
  • For example, this could be used to send location data back to developers.  This would allow Loopt or Google Latitude to update a users location without running an application in the foreground.
  
  
  • Having this implemented in  this manner, it would allow the users to have control over this data
    
    
    
    • Users should be able to go to settings application and disable this feature for all applications, or for particular applications
    
    
    • Apple could control the frequency that the GPS would be turned on, so they could conserve power appropriately.