Hi guys, my name is Justin Liu and I am a WP designer/developer. For the last couple of months I've seen a lot of posts about the 'missing' WP notification centre. I personally think live tiles are enough for notifications, however I do understand why some people would still love to have one.
Here are a couple of problems I've found with my live tiles.
First problem is, the default live tile design for 3rd party apps is just not nice. C'mon a tiny number inside a black circle? Sigh...
Second one is that because WP restricts 3rd party apps so they can only update their tiles every 30 mins (also note that the tiles won't be updated at all if the corresponding background task is turned off by the user or when battery saver is on and battery is low). This will cause the live tiles to give incorrect numbers. For example, I cleared all my notifications on my Facebook 20 mins ago but my phone still shows me there are 4 unread notifications.
If, there is a notification centre coming, I think swiping from the left might not be a good idea to bring it to front. Here is why.
Notification centre should be accessible within an app, right? So you actually need to do the swiping from the left edge of the phone. But please don't do it! This feature should be saved for quickly switching apps! Think about how you use a Windows 8 tablet. It is such a cool feature and it should become a standard for Windows products.
I don't like notification centre, I don't like it because it's boring, it's got everything vertically aligned just like a list of unread and read emails. If each pinned app's tile can be properly designed, also maybe reduce the gap between live tiles, have less important apps use small tiles, more important ones use normal or wide tiles, we can create some really nice start screens with unbalanced, modern design...*)#*#$#^$#$%&^*(!!$ (alrite it's late and I've already started dreaming LOL)
Anyway, it's just my 2 cents. Night guys
PS. Just realised this is my first wpcentral forum post...
Here are a couple of problems I've found with my live tiles.
First problem is, the default live tile design for 3rd party apps is just not nice. C'mon a tiny number inside a black circle? Sigh...
Second one is that because WP restricts 3rd party apps so they can only update their tiles every 30 mins (also note that the tiles won't be updated at all if the corresponding background task is turned off by the user or when battery saver is on and battery is low). This will cause the live tiles to give incorrect numbers. For example, I cleared all my notifications on my Facebook 20 mins ago but my phone still shows me there are 4 unread notifications.
If, there is a notification centre coming, I think swiping from the left might not be a good idea to bring it to front. Here is why.
Notification centre should be accessible within an app, right? So you actually need to do the swiping from the left edge of the phone. But please don't do it! This feature should be saved for quickly switching apps! Think about how you use a Windows 8 tablet. It is such a cool feature and it should become a standard for Windows products.
I don't like notification centre, I don't like it because it's boring, it's got everything vertically aligned just like a list of unread and read emails. If each pinned app's tile can be properly designed, also maybe reduce the gap between live tiles, have less important apps use small tiles, more important ones use normal or wide tiles, we can create some really nice start screens with unbalanced, modern design...*)#*#$#^$#$%&^*(!!$ (alrite it's late and I've already started dreaming LOL)
Anyway, it's just my 2 cents. Night guys
PS. Just realised this is my first wpcentral forum post...