Notification Concept for Windows Phone.. what do you guys think

I don't think this discussion can really get anywhere anymore. The defenders have hijacked it. There's a thread on wp central that is a lot more constructive.


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People seem to fail to think about a lot of things.
One thing is developers. Live tiles in theory work as a great alternative to a notification center. BUT only if developers utilize them properly.

N8ter said:

Live tiles are old news. Tiles are big icons and counter on them are like iOS badges. Live flip tiles are like android widgets. if it happened is obvious any decent feature phone has counters for that. What is important is that the user can get enough info at a glance to prioritize the checking of their notifications.

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Nope. Live tiles can do more than that. My calendar tile, for instance, displays appointments for that day (as well as birthdays)
I pinned my friend to my start screen and the tile displays his latest tweet. Weather displays the temperature and a sun or moon based on
the time of say. Mail will show a preview of my unread emails. Weave news reader shows the latest articles. My me tile shows how many mentions I have unread. Metrotube shows latest videos from my subscriptions. They work as good, if not better than a notification center.
Problem is, most devs on WP at the moment DONT UTILIZE THEM. at most, they slap a number notification tile on their app and move on.

N8ter said:

Live Tiles are a good concept but whoever in Microsoft thought that was the complete makings of a decent notification system was smoking some really good crack that day.

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Nope. The people smoking crack are the devs making the apps. Why, see what I just said.

Also, a notification center uses toast notifications. Its a notification center after all. Problem? Most apps don't use them.
I probably have about 3 apps that use them. I can name 2 off the top of my head. Alphajacks; Send to Windows Phone. Toast notifications
are used LESS than live tiles. SO even though a notification center woks in concept, real world, it would be less used and supported than
the live tiles. It would require devs to put a major effort to add toast notifications in a large amount of apps for a NC to even be remotely useful.
and if they are going to put all that effort into that, they might as well use what Windows Phone already has and make a decent live tile.

Now if Microsoft made a place to see notifications from apps NOT pinned to the home screen (say, a page accessed by swiping to the right from the app-list?) I would be warmer to such an idea (I can understand wanting to see updates from an app without pinning it).

TL;DR Live tiles can be used as an alternative, and a Notification Center works in theory but not in reality.

Also, yes I know this thread has been dead for over a year, but it seems that people are still thinking Windows Phone needs a Notification
Center today and talking about it