Newsletter
So far today we are seeing a lot of sweet and cool features emerging from today’s Lollipop preview. If you are just joining us then Lollipop is here and the system images have been made public albeit only currently for the Nexus 5 and 7. Sorry guys everyone else will have to wait. So far we have seen a lot of tweaks and improvements to the way in which notifications are displayed, interacted with and dealt with. However, this latest one is certainly one of my favorites if not my favorite overall.
Typically speaking before Lollipop came along Notifications were boring and lacking any real depth or imagination. Forget that because with Lollipop everything has changed. When long pressing notifications before not much would happen with the relative app opening from where the link came from or a link to the App info section of the settings. Now when you long press on any notification all kinds of magic happens. Firstly once the notification is long pressed a sweet little animation occurs (shown below) and shows the name of the app where the notification came from along with its icon. In addition to this the change also still creates a clear link back to the original app info in the settings menu. This is shown as the small info (i) in the animation below on the right side. Once you are done looking at the animation you can simply long press it once more and it reverts the notification back to its original normal display as if nothing had happened.
This is a real sweet example of how animations (and Lollipop) in general will improve the functionality and appearance of notifications as well as other services. Like the additional features we are seeing today it seems Lollipop is thinking of the details as well as the more obvious overall aesthetic qualities and truly building an environment which makes mundane processes like notifications fun and functional. If this is anything to go by then I can’t wait to see what else Lollipop has in store. What do you think? Do you like the new animation style notifications? Will you be using them? Whatever your thoughts drop us a line.
