Apple patents hint at better iPhone alerts, preferences

Apple has made it clear that it is taking a very cautious approach towards adding features to the iPhone OS. This extremely minimal design philosophy can sometimes lead to arguable feature deficiencies in some aspects of the OS, but new patent filings reveal two areas on which Apple is focusing more attention: notifications of missed messages, and adjusting application preferences.

AppleInsider dug up a few Apple patents filed late last year that describe a number of new features and enhancements to iPhone OS. On the "catching up with the rest of the industry" side, one patent describes what is essentially a notification dashboard that can be display full details for things like missed calls, an SMS counter, and voicemail. Currently, the iPhone provides a transparent popup notification for one or two such events, but this proposed dashboard would be more functional, offering quick access to any of these applications. The dashboard could also be persistent through the unlocking process, offering this launchpad for catching up on messages instead of disappearing and leaving the user stranded, as the current iPhone OS does if the user takes too much time to unlock the phone.

Another patent reveals that Apple is still kicking the tires on what to do about application preferences. The current HIG for iPhone OS recommend that developers place a preferences pane in the Settings application, while some argue (myself included) that this goes against current conventions. Desktop applications retain their own preferences panel for adjusting behavior, and tearing these settings out of a mobile application creates a disjointed experience, forcing the user to needlessly bounce between an application and Settings just to flip a switch or two.

To help solve the debate and perhaps even merge the best of both worlds, this second patent reveals a method for invoking a global preferences "mode" right from the Home screen. As AppleInsider notes, the effect looks to duplicate Mac OS X's Dashboard, wherein this mode would place an (i) icon over every app, allowing users to quickly adjust settings for one or more applications on the fly. I personally still don't see the need for adjusting preferences for multiple applications at a time, so this still feels like Apple is designing a solution to problems that don't exist. In most cases, a user needs to adjust the behavior of an application he or she is using at the moment; a simple settings button somewhere within an application's UI is the quickest and least intrusive way of providing a switch for doing so.

Of course, there is no way of knowing when or even if these features will make it into iPhone OS, though the more functional notification dashboard is likely tied to the push notification system that Apple pulled before releasing 2.1.