New notification center concept app released today

A free app, Nokia sWiPe, was just released today, bringing the “swipe to the left” notification center concept to life.

This app allows you to demo Glance Screen, a modified lockscreen, a modified home screen experience, and a notification center. The app first starts on the Glance Screen, where you double tap to fully turn on the phone (comparable to pressing the power button).

Once at the lockscreen, you have four different swipe options. Your notification counts are displayed at the bottom of the screen, suggesting that if you swipe up, you’ll see all your notifications. A Windows icon resides on the right side of the lockscreen, implying that a swipe to the right will take you to your Start Screen. And finally, swiping to the left takes you to multitasking, and swiping down brings you to the Kids Corner.

The notification center is slightly different from other concepts. It uses the existing live tiles and simply sorts them by the date they were updated, to provide a chronological history of updates. This looks nice, but includes a number of issues. For example, many apps have insufficient live tiles. In chat apps, toast notifications almost always have a preview of the message received, but the live tiles sometimes lack that preview. This notification concept would prove inferior to simply using the Toasts. It also could be difficult for the operating system to know when live tiles were actually updated (apps using periodic 30 minute tasks might trigger a tile update even though there’s nothing new).

This concept also includes a new multitasking page, which displays 4 minimized windows at once if you swipe to the right of your Start Screen. Theoretically something like the capacitive Start button on phones could be used to detect swipes and allow access to multitasking and notifications from anywhere, but I personally feel that the current multitasking setup is better.

And finally, swiping down brings you to your apps list, which feels really strange.

You can experience this concept for yourself by downloading the app for FREE in the Store!

For more info, see the Windowstecha Blog