iOS 5 introduced us to what has come to be known as ‘Banner Alerts’ – a simple yet effective feature for those times when you’re running a full-screen app or simply watching a video on your iOS device, and don’t want to miss out on your notifications. Android may have triumphed with it’s rich notification center from the start, but Banner Alerts is something we all could benefit from. In case you don’t want to wait for Google to implement the feature, Notification Popup Alert is a free app recently released on the Play Store that attempts to replicate the feature on your Android device. The app is still in a Beta state, and does not have a whole lot of customization options to offer for now. However, it does serve its purpose, so let’s take a detailed look at it after the jump...
The app is installed as an Accessibility service and will have to enabled it the Android’s Settings under Accessibility. You can navigate there straight from the app itself. Once the app is enabled, you’ll start receiving on-screen alerts for your notifications in form of a popup banner near the bottom edge of the screen. Tapping a notification makes it disappear, which lets you easily dismiss them after reading their content. In case of music notifications, you can control music playback right from the banner. The alerts look well-polished, and go well with the overall Android UI.
There are a few settings that you can play around with. Alerts can be enabled for all apps, or only for select apps of your choice. The drawback in the latter scenario is a limit of up to 5 apps max for now. Hopefully, it’s just a limitation in the beta version, and the final release will remove it.
You can alter the style and height of the notification popup as well. There are two styles available – dark and light; similarly, the two available height options include normal and extended.
The app is still in it’s infancy stage, and can do with more customization options and features. Let’s see how it fares against the competition the app faces from the likes of iPhone Notifications Lite and other similar apps out there. It does serve a pretty useful feature, since it keeps you from missing out on important notifications while playing a video game or watching a movie in full screen.
Would you want banner alerts on your Android phone? Would you even be willing to pay for such a feature, if implemented right? Let us know in the comments section below.
No comments:
Post a Comment