Phandroid
Inbox by Gmail could inspire a new evolution of Android notifications [CONCEPT]
Google’s Invite app by the Gmail team introduced a lot of great features to help make email life easier, with highlights including the ability to snooze email, have reminders pinned to the top of your inbox, bundled messages by topic and more. Many of the actions performed in Inbox involve swiping an email. You can swipe to the right to mark it as “done,” or swipe to the left to have it come up at a later time or date.
Phandroid developer Steve Albright wondered if such a system could have a big impact on Android notifications at the system level. He envisioned a notification system where a user can either act on it by jumping into the app, swipe it to the right to close it, or swipe it to the left to have that notification pop back up at some point later. Our friend Liam Spradlin from Android Police caught wind of the idea and conceptualized it in the video you see above.
It certainly is something that could be of use to many people. I, for one, hate having a cluttered notification tray, but if I dismiss notifications before getting a chance to look at them then I will forget they were ever there.
Steve’s suggestion is that this could be implemented on a system-wide level and Google could do it in such a way that developers wouldn’t even need to update their apps. Notifications would work largely as they always have — with advanced controls for things like music playback or buttons for replying to messages — except users would be given the option of dismissing any notification they want temporarily instead of saying goodbye to it forever.
The feasibility of such a feature isn’t likely to be 100% trivial, though if Google can find a way to implement it in a way that makes sense and doesn’t intrude on the user experience in a negative way it could be another one of many killer features Android has become known for. Let us know if you wouldn’t mind seeing something like this in a future Android upgrade by dropping a line below.
Must watch: working Project Ara prototype shown off in behind the scenes video
Still in its infancy, Project Ara still has a ways to go before it reaches a consumer release. Over the past few months, we’ve watch as more information surrounding the project continually trickled out, the most recent being a second round of Project Ara developer’s conferences slated for January in both the US and Singapore.
Some might be surprised to know that although Project Ara runs Android, it isn’t actually an official Android project or even a Nexus device. In fact, it’s not even a Google project. This was made clear in Phonebloks’ latest blog post which clears up some confusion about their involvement in the project. The Ara team wants to make it clear that Dutch designer Dave Hakkens who came up with the Phonebloks concept we showed you guys awhile back is more of a community manager, creating videos and giving sneak peeks at Ara development.
That’s all good and dandy, but we’re sure many of you are dying to see more of the actual prototype and in Phoneblok’s latest video — released just today — you can watch as Dave goes behind the scenes at the NK Labs in Boston, MA and fires up a working Project Ara prototype known as Spiral 1. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t get goosebumps.
Although space on the Spiral 1 prototype is limited (about 49% of the space available to developers), Spiral 2 which is being developed by Toshiba will have “most of the area” available for the developers’ function. Unfortunately, the Toshiba-built prototype wasn’t shown off in the video but will instead take center stage during next years’ Project Ara developer’s conference.
Once again, pricing for an entry-level Project Ara device will likely run around $50-100, although final pricing of an actual Project Ara device will largely remain in the hands of developers building modules. Sign. Me. Up.
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