Hacker News Reader

Comment by chton | Hacker News Reader

To pick on just one point of this massive article: The quick actions on notifications are going to be very useful. I hope other OSs implement them too (I'm a WP user myself). They're unobtrusive, and they can make the entire phone feel more natural. They also enable new kinds of quick interaction: imagine an 'OK' button on a text message that lets the sender know you've seen it, without the need to send a message saying just that yourself.

View on HN

Android has had them for some time, and as you say, they are fantastic.

When implemented. It's a weakness of Android that few developers take advantage of all the features - I suspect a lot of apps are made iOS-first, so if a feature isn't available in iOS, it isn't implemented on Android. I hope that iOS gaining this feature will mean it is used a lot more on Android, too.

That's a good point. We'll have to see if this means it'll be picked up more on Android too, it could get very interesting.

Yes, though they are more limited in Android: they are just buttons that can jump to the app (= launch a specific intent). On the contrary, the new iOS notifications can have a real interaction; e.g.: you can answer to a message within the notification itself and never switch context.

Yes and no - Android also allows apps to draw standalone windows on top of the OS, like this one does:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.everything...

So it isn't quite the same, but nor does it require switching apps.

AFAICT, that's because it's a SMS application, so it's got a special hook being called when a SMS arrives. For normal notifications (delivered through GCM), that's not possible.

Android has had this for quite a while, though not to many apps make full use of it. http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/notifications.h...

I wasn't aware of this, despite having used enough Android in the past. Shows you how many implement it, I suppose :)

Or how well you advertise it. Apple heavily promotes every feature tiny or large, while usually most of the cool Android ones get ignored even by the tech writers who are supposed to know about Android, let alone regular people or press.

Or that lots of Android apps are shoddy iPhone ports by developers who approach it as a second class citizen, and so are unaware of what it can do.

And then they complain that Android users don't buy their apps...

For example with emails you see this – get a new email, in the notification you can click on "delete" (as I get far too many unnecessary mails) or, if accidentally deleted, undo it again. Or click on Reply and directly write a reply.

This works with AOSP Email and Gmail (maybe others as well).

> imagine an 'OK' button on a text message that lets the sender know you've seen it, without the need to send a message saying just that yourself.

That already exists in the form of "read notifications".

That's why I really like them. If I go away for 5 minutes in the middle of conversation, I don't have to tell the person about it, they'll see their messages were no longer read.

I never found those to be an adequate solution. It's fine for an ongoing conversation, but for a singular message it's useless. I might get it and see it, but not read it yet. Just because I'm at my computer or phone doesn't mean I'm reading and acknowledging the message.

Blackberry 10 has this feature also for BBM and SMS. It's great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com