Notifications as the Next Interface

Following Apple’s huge announcements at WWDC last week, there has been a lot of talk about how changes in iOS’s notifications architecture will open a new class of apps. Over at Wired, Matt Honan writes:

Once developers begin to really harness what interactive notifications can do in iOS 8—and they will—it’s going to cause one of the most radical changes since third-party apps. With the advent of iOS 8, notifications are the new interface frontier…

When we can interact with our data in short bursts via notifications, we make remarkable efficiency gains, especially on tasks that we perform again and again. Apps will become more about information and communications; we’re going to think of them as services instead of as windows onto our data. The things that can make best use of single click efficiency will soar.

This has the faint whiff of being overblown, but I think there’s legitimate merit to this idea that new interfaces will become less monolothic, less centralized, more syndicated and integrated into our sessions on mobile devices. Read the full article here.

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