Two recent Apple patent filings have been released by the US Patent & Trademark Office that could provide improvements to the iPhone’s interface and message notification.
The first of which, will provide a way for users to change preferences from one or multiple applications directly from the iPhone’s home screen. Filed in December by members of Apple’s iPhone dev team, the patent displays a new global preferences pane, which could allow users to efficiently change application settings without having to navigate through the maze of settings panels within the iPhone’s “settings” application.
This would similarly echo the way settings for dashboard widgets on Macs are organized. A user will have the ability to use a multi-touch action that would reveal a global settings icon for all applications which will be configurable.
“The user interface has a plurality of application icons. In response to a first gesture, the GUI changes the appearances of the application icons whose corresponding applications have user-adjustable settings,” the filing explains. “In response to a second gesture on a selected application icon whose appearance is changed, the GUI displays user-adjustable settings of an application that corresponds to the selected application icon. In response to one or more additional gestures, the GUI changes one or more user-adjustable settings of the application that corresponds to the selected application icon.”
The second patent, filed a few moths prior, will provide the user with a better alternative to receiving notification of missed messages. The current notification method is based entirely on text and disappears when the device is unlocked, which may leave the user on their own to remember what it was about or have to look to the app’s red notification badge.
The filing details a for more intuitive means for alerting a user of a missed message by not only remaining on the screen even after the iPhone is unlocked, but will additionally link the user to the notification. This new purposed method could prove to be even more useful by providing support for global push notifications for third party apps.
“In response to detecting an interaction by a user with the device, the plurality of icons display notification information for the plurality of communication modalities,” the filing explains. “In response to detecting an unlock interaction by the user with the device, the device is unlocked, and a communication in the plurality of communications is presented that was received while the device was in the locked state, or information about the communication is presented.”
[via AppleInsider]
