notification

Most iPhone and iPad users already know what it's like to be in the middle of an intense game of Angry Birds only to have a friend start sending instant messages, thus creating countless popups from push alerts, interrupting gameplay. The way iOS currently handles push alerts can be a real annoyance.

This simple guide will show you how to take control of the push alerts on your iOS device, allowing you to decide what applications are important enough to interrupt what you are doing with a text alert.… Read more

In just a week and a half Apple will take the wraps off "the future of iOS" at its Worldwide Developers Conference. Two features that are said to be making a debut as part of that introduction are widgets and a new notifications system.

Buried at the tail end of a post on murmurs that Apple's been inviting press from around the world to come to the WWDC keynote, TechCrunch claims that Apple will be using that time to introduce "completely revamped notifications and widgets."

This is not the first time Apple's notification system … Read more

The White House today sent Congress a proposed cybersecurity law designed to force companies to do more to fend off cyberattacks, a threat that has been reinforced by recent reports about vulnerabilities in systems used in power and water utilities.

This proposal seems designed to prod the legislative branch to enact by the end of the year some variety of cybersecurity legislation, which has been stalled by concerns about privacy, Internet "kill switches," and overreaching regulation. One proposal from Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), for instance, would have explicitly given the government the power to "order the disconnection&… Read more

iOS notifications concept from Andreas on Vimeo.

On our list of iPhone 5 most wanted features, at No. 13 we have "improved home screen" with a better notifications system. A lot of people have been hoping Apple would come up with a more modular home screen that's more Android-like and has something akin to customizable widgets.

We suspect we'll get something like this when Apple rolls out iOS 5 next month at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but in the meantime, take a look at this concept for a redesigned notifications system/home screen that the folks at 9to5 Mac have highlighted. It's pretty slick.

… Read more

To cap off a week chock-full of Apple-related rumors, we now have this: is Apple about to acquire a company in the process of giving its iOS notifications system a major makeover?

Apple blog Cult of Mac says it's hearing exactly that from a source, who is not named. The company Apple is allegedly buying isn't confirmed in the report, but is said to be "small" and currently has an application available for sale in the iOS App Store.

Now that would describe about a thousand companies. But there aren't that many that do slick … Read more

The Commerce Department today edged toward endorsing new federal laws regulating companies' data collection practices and requiring that customers be notified of data breaches.

In an 88-page report (PDF), the department also suggested rewriting a 1986 privacy law to address "privacy protection in cloud computing and location-based services," but didn't offer any details. That broad approach is backed by tech companies including Google, Microsoft, AT&T, and eBay, but is likely to be opposed by the Justice Department.

All of these ideas have been advanced before, of course: California's data breach notification law took effect … Read more

Twitter Inc. has released a significant update to its iOS App for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. This update, now version 3.2, adds push notifications for @replies and messages, fixes several bugs, and adds inline media for iPad users.

Users can now be notified whenever their name is @mentioned in an account they follow or when they receive a new direct message. Other improvements to the iPhone version of the App include better displays of shortened URLs, better loading of reserved Twitter.com paths, and a fix for connections errors when a system clock is set incorrectly.

Retina Display … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Facebook knows you don't want to see as many FarmVille news items and is doing something about it. That is, unless you play FarmVille all day. If that's the case, now there's a way to get even more of it in your news feed.

At a barbecue for game developers and staff here today, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined ways the company is changing the frequency of game notifications that show up in a user's news feed. The bottom line is that if you play a lot of games, you'll … Read more

It's not quite the solution iPhone users might have been expecting, but Google has brought yet another way to get push e-mail on the iPhone. Kind of.

Users with the company's Google Mobile search app installed will now find an option to receive push notifications for new e-mails or calendar events within the app's settings menu, along with a very neat option to enable them only for certain parts of the day. This is a particularly useful feature if you want to keep your phone from buzzing or beeping during the times when you're usually asleep. … Read more