One of the things that made my iPhone into an extension of my arm for the three years that I used one was the ability to see at a glance anything that required my attention, whether it was email or Twitter, or Instagram, or Path, or one of a dozen other social networks and services that I have signed up for. At first I thought this was a great feature — but I’ve changed my mind.

A profusion of bubbles, banners and popups

Not only did certain apps (like Twitter) wake up the iPhone screen even when the device was sleeping to flash a message, but every icon for every app also had mini-notifications built in, so that I could see at a glance how many emails had come in since the last time I had checked, or how many Facebook messages, etc. Each icon had a little number next to it that wouldn’t go away until I opened the app and dealt with the messages or updates (there are also banner updates that can be individually configured for different apps).

If you need to stay on top of things like email, this is a really great feature. If you are somewhat obsessive or have something approaching attention-deficit disorder, however, it’s like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole that you play with your phone: open the app and click through the emails so that the number next to the icon goes away, and five minutes later there are a hundred more waiting. Twitter is the same, and so is Facebook.

(Note: I know that you can turn these off on the iPhone, as some commenters have pointed out. I am just describing my experience of the default settings, not making a blanket statement about the value of the iPhone as a whole).

To me, those numbers became a nagging indicator of my failure to stay on top of everything I was supposed to be paying attention to. Which is why I noticed when I switched to Android that there weren’t any notification bubbles next to the icons, and nothing woke up my phone. There was a small LED at the top of the phone — a Motorola Razr HD — that changed color based on certain input, but that was it. And when you wake the phone up, there are some small icons at the top that indicate new emails, etc. All very easy to ignore.

How can something that’s missing be positive?

Many iPhone fans are probably going to see what I’m describing as a negative rather than a positive. After all, I’m talking about how the Android actually *lacks* certain features that the iPhone has — how could that be seen as a good thing? And that’s what I wondered when I started using the Android.

In fact, I spent a fair bit of time looking for ways to reproduce the same kind of notification experience I got with the iPhone. I tweaked the settings — which don’t really give you the same kind of granularity that you get with the iPhone (or at least not in my experience) — and I even downloaded a bunch of apps that were designed to replicate the iPhone notifications somehow, right down to the noises they made, which were programmed into my subconscious.

Nothing I tried seemed to reproduce the kind of notifications I got on the iPhone, however, or at least not in a way that seemed to fit my needs. So I basically stopped trying. Now the light on my phone blinks from time to time, but it’s really easy to ignore — and it chirps sometimes, but there’s no flashing on-screen message to tell me what it is. I have different rings for texts and phone calls from important people and that’s about it.

It’s not you, iPhone — it’s me

When I open my Android phone up from sleep mode, there are no tiny numbers beside any of the icons. There’s a widget that shows the first few subject lines of emails, so I can see whether there’s something hugely important, and another widget with a small calendar view. And when I want to see notifications from all the various apps and services, I can swipe down on the screen (a feature Apple borrowed from Android, I believe) and see a list.

Not having better notifications may be a downside for some, but I guess for me it has been a blessing in disguise — I was trying to be more disciplined about my real-time updates, the way some others like Om have described, and turn off all the notifications one by one, but I am weak. Maybe it took a switch to a different platform and an unfamiliar user interface for me to make the decisions I should have made before to make my life a little less hectic.

Believe me, I’m not trying to say that the Android phone is better than the iPhone in every circumstance or for every person, or that Google is better than Apple. I’m just trying to describe my usage of both and how I came to the conclusion that for me, fewer notifications (or more subtle ones) is actually a good thing.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Brosix

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As someone who generally uses a mobile device from the crack of dawn until it’s time for bed, this question is almost counter-intuitive. Yet, as I read about experiences from people who actually have flirted with a smartphone divorce, I’m intrigued. Why? Because there’s a common theme here: Those who have entered the limited-smartphone world appear to enjoy less stress, more peace and greater clarity.

The latest example comes from Brad Feld, a managing director at the Foundry Group VC firm. Feld stayed off his iPhone for 14 days, with the first seven days being completely offline. The following week, he connected to the online world through his MacBook Air and Kindle tablet. He’s using the iPhone again, but in a totally different way: Voice calls, the occasional map query and checking his calendar. The result?

“There’s some magic peace that comes over me when I’m not constantly looking at my iPhone. I really noticed it after two weeks of not doing it. After a few days of withdrawal, the calm appears. My brain is no longer jangly, the dopamine effect of “hey – another email, another tweet” goes away, and I actually am much faster at processing whatever I’ve got on a 27″ screen than on a little tiny thing that my v47 eyes are struggling to read.”

Surprisingly, given that I cover mobile technology for a living, I see merit to this approach, although I’m not advocating, nor willing to try a complete lack of smartphone use. I sympathize with the “always connected” stress that Feld has alleviated. There are some days where I wake up already feeling worn out by what I know is waiting for me: A smartphone filled with tweets, Facebook updates, emails, blog comments to respond to, friend requests on several social networks, and the list goes on….

There’s a good reason not to go cold turkey and dump the smartphone though, and Feld hits this topic spot on:

“Now, I’d love for there to be a way for me to know about high priority interrupts – things that actually are urgent. But my iPhone doesn’t do this at all in any discernable (sic) way. There are too many different channels to reach me and they aren’t effectively conditioned – I either have to open them up to everyone (e.g. txtmsg via my phone number) or convince people to use a specific piece of software – many, such as Glassboard – which are very good, but do require intentional behavior on both sides.”

I think this feeling of “I might be missing something important on my phone“ is prevalent among any smartphone owner that seeks to curtail their handset use. Regardless of the mobile platform you choose — I use iOS and Android daily, which could be adding to my particular challenges — one could use notifications to separate the noise from the signal on a smartphone or tablet. That’s probably an area I need to look at reconfiguring in my own mobile device use: I have way too many apps notifying me. But that’s just a start. Feld is on to something when it comes to the need for a better way to manage “high-priority interrupts,” as he calls them.

Clearly, emails, texts and other messages need responses. For this, Feld is relying on specific times to manage those activities and he’s doing so through devices with larger displays and keyboards. As I think about the emails that I need to respond to, most of them probably could wait a few hours and I may try living without an email client or web page open all day, every day as a result. [Ed. note: we frown on this ;) ] In Feld’s implementation, he found immediate benefits:

“Yesterday, it occurred to me that I was much more mentally engaged throughout the day in the stuff going on (I had a typically packed day). I had dinner with my brother at night. No phones were on the table, no checking in to Foursquare, no quick scanning of Twitter in the bathroom while peeing. When I got home, I hung out with Amy – no email. This morning, I just spent an hour and went through the 200 emails that had piled up since 5:30pm when I’d last checked my email. My inbox is empty.”

Completely ditching the smartphone isn’t the answer here; that’s not what I’m suggesting nor considering. However, as the smartphone has evolved over the past handful of years, I notice more “information anxiety” in my life is the effect: The smarter the phone gets, the more I use it. And the more I use it, the more scattered I often feel in my thoughts and focus.

I couldn’t easily live without my smartphone because I do get tremendous benefit from it: Socially, professionally, and personally. However, cutting back on the near-constant “face in the screen” activities might not be a bad idea until I see better software methods to manage my use of this mobile hardware.

As a follow up, even if a smartphone use reduction experiment doesn’t pan out, I’ll be looking at how to improve or focus notifications to reduce stress while also allowing for high priority interruptions. I’m open to suggestions in the meantime, as I suspect there are some tools to help. I also think there’s a tremendous opportunity for improvements both at the smartphone application level as well as in the native platform. I know I have to take responsibility for my usage patters, but a truly smart phone should help.

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Now with OS X Mountain Lion, which should arrive some time this summer, true feature parity for Notes, Reminders and Notifications comes to OS X. I’ve spent some time with the new features, and I’m eager to share my experiences with you.

Notes

Notes syncing from iOS back to OS X has always struck me as a tacked-on feature, with notes buried in Mail.app, making viewing and editing notes awkward and unpleasant. With Mountain Lion, notes get their rightful position in their own app. The Mountain Lion version is a near-duplicate of the iOS version, and I do not view that as a criticism, because Notes on iOS is very elegant in its simplicity.

What I found interesting is while Notes can be turned on and off via the iCloud System Preference, it apparently still uses IMAP for some of the backend transfer as I was asked to enter in my passwords for my Gmail accounts. Notes appear to sync quickly, within a minute or so of being edited.

I’m really excited about Notes being easier to use in OS X. I swap between Evernote and Notes for my note-taking needs, with Evernote getting my article-length notes clipped from the web or imported PDFs, and Notes getting my day-to-day notes, like what printer my Mom has, dial-in codes for meetings, meeting notes, etc.

Reminders

Reminders, formerly To-Dos, made a lot of sense living in iCal pre-iOS. However, the Calendar iOS app never had to-dos, and with the advent of the Reminders iOS app, it became very uncomfortable having them stored in iCal. I always found iCal’s handling of to-dos unwieldy, and being stuck in a small pane off to the side didn’t help. It’s been said that the areas of OS X and iOS that are the most polished are the ones Steve Jobs was very involved in — if so, I’m fairly confident the man never managed a task list in iCal.

Now with Mountain Lion, to-dos are moved to their own Reminders app, and life couldn’t be better. It’s a nearly identical copy of the iOS app in looks and function, with two big differences: on OS X you can choose if a list is on iCloud or your Mac, and I cannot see a way to set a location-based reminder. While OS X isn’t really location aware (even though it does have Find my Mac), it would be nice if I could set a reminder in OS X for something I need to do at work and have my iPhone remind me when I get there.

Overall, I’m happy with Reminders in Mountain Lion as it allows me to easily manage my to-dos. While I still expect to handle most of my project-level task management in OmniFocus, Reminders will be the app I use to remind me of life’s daily minutiae.

Notifications

The last of what I call the Big Three features to migrate from iOS to OS X is Notifications. Users of Growl will find Notifications very similar as notifications are displayed in the upper right-hand corner. As with iOS, you can choose if an app displays a banner, an alert that shows up in the middle of the screen, a badge icon, or all three.

Right now, obviously, only the apps built into Mountain Lion are supported. According to this piece by John Gruber, only apps acquired from the Mac App Store can send events to Notifications. As an aside, you can configure Mail.app to only alert you if you receive an e-mail from someone you have flagged as a VIP, which helps cut down on the popup clutter.

So far my experiences with Notifications have been light, with not many apps supporting it. I’m not sure if Notifications will ever fully replace Growl for me since not all the apps I rely on Growl for are available in the Mac App Store.

Final thoughts

Apple’s headline on the Mountain Lion web page is “Inspired by iPad. Re-imagined for Mac,” and that’s pretty much true based on my usage of it so far. I’m happy there is feature parity between iOS and OS X for Notes and Reminders. If you don’t complement your Macintosh with an iOS device, you may not derive the same excitement I do from these new features. But if you’re a  heavy user of Notes and Reminders you will be thrilled that these apps are now on OS X.

One hope I have, with OS X moving to a yearly upgrade cycle, as iOS has always had, is that features that complement each other on both operating systems will be released at the same time, and not with the lag we currently have.

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Emails, tweets, notifications, text and instant messages, Facebook status updates, Path moments — all these are new tools of communication when taken together are notification hell. These notifications prey on human desire for a dopamine fix. And just as we are over-caffeinated, I think the 21st century is quickly making us over-notified. (I think this is my second new phrase of the week – the first one being aspirational escape velocity)

The worst part is that there is nothing we can do about it. Apparently Tweeting and checking emails is much harder addiction to give up that cigarettes or alcohol, according to a study by Chicago University’s Booth Business School. No surprise since they are all about attention gone awry. The dopamine fix, I guess is worse than nicotine. Especially since it is free – while a fine bottle of scotch can cost a pretty penny.

What all this multitasking is doing to our brain is hard to imagine. This video by Chris Crutchfield does a good job of being a mirror to our over-notified selves.

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Notifications

As previewed, Apple’s new notification system resides in its own screen, accessible by pulling down the status bar portion of your iPhone’s screen. You can either reorder how notifications will appear in the overall list, or set them to be ordered automatically according to time received. You can also manually choose which apps appear in the notification center (including Apple’s built-in Weather and Stock widgets) and which don’t.

iMessage

Apple now boasts a BBM-style group messaging client that allows you to send pictures, video, text, audio and contact information for free over Wi-Fi and cellular networks to other iOS 5 users. The service checks to see if recipients are iMessage compatible, and automatically sends content using your network’s standard texting plan instead if they aren’t. You can also set up email addresses to receive iMessages, which is especially useful for iPads and iPod touches. Delivered and optional read receipts for messages are also part of the bargain.

Newsstand

This is where Apple will be centralizing all digital subscriptions, including magazines like Popular Science and newspapers like the New York Times.  Having your magazines and newspapers all in one place should keep your app screens more free of clutter, and also help you see what’s new at a glance — covers update to reflect the most current issue available to download. Plus, a Store link directs you to a special section of the App Store dedicated to subscription-based publications.

Reminders

Location-based reminders should help you remember to pick up milk on your way home. Apple may thin out the ranks of the to-do apps from third-party developers with this one, since it’s about as deep as the average user needs, syncs automatically for free using iCloud, and is preinstalled on iOS 5 devices.

Twitter

What’s the secret ingredient for iOS 5? Twitter, backed right in. You can now sign in to your Twitter account in the Settings app, which opens system-wide sharing options. Settings also provides a direct link for installing the free, official Twitter app. One more strike against third-party clients.

Camera and Photos

Hardware shutter and lock-screen camera access: two things which will make it way easier to take a picture with your iPhone in iOS 5. The hardware button is actually the volume-up button, but I don’t think people will have too much of problem keeping that straight. Other new camera features include pinch-to-zoom, single-tap focus, exposure locks and grid overlay. In the Photos app, you can perform edits like cropping, auto-enhance or red-eye removal, and create your own albums.

Safari

New to Safari are actual tabs on the iPad, which make browsing much easier, and Reading List/Reader view, which let you save articles to check out later and strip away everything but the content for easier perusal. Plus, much-improved Safari performance all around.

PC Free and Wi-Fi Sync

You can now setup and manage your device completely from the device itself under iOS 5. No need to connect to iTunes, and with Wi-Fi Sync and iTunes Match, you won’t even have to make a hardware connection to transfer your iTunes music from your computer to your device. This may be the biggest step iOS 5 takes in terms of cutting ties with computing’s past.

Mail and Calendar

HTML-formatted composition makes its way to Mail in iOS 5, as does message flagging and mailbox folder management. Search body text of emails for keywords, too. These are more contributions to the Post-PC nature of iOS devices. Calendar also boasts new adding, renaming and deleting features for PC-free management.

Multitasking gestures for iPad

Switching between apps has never been easier on the iPad than in iOS 5, since you can use four- or five-finger swipes to rotate between open apps, and pinch zoom to close them. Swiping up also reveals the multitasking bar.

Game Center

New Game Center additions in iOS 5 include achievement points, photo sharing, friend recommendations and more, making it feel much more like Xbox Live, the gold standard in online gaming. Apple says 67 million users currently are active on Game Center.

AirPlay Mirroring

This is iPad 2 and iPhone 4S-specific, but it’s almost worth the upgrade. It lets you broadcast the entire contents of your iPad, including home screens and all apps, live to your TV via a connected Apple TV. The potential applications for watching video, doing presentations and gaming are endless.

iCloud

A huge part of iOS 5 is iCloud, which replaces MobileMe and provides free syncing of email, contacts, calendars and more for all iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion users. Later, iCloud will also provide the ground work for iTunes Match, Apple’s cloud music service.

Apple’s new iPhone may have stolen the show today, but iOS 5 is great even for Apple device owners who aren’t planning a hardware upgrade anytime soon.

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Japan’s early-warning system for earthquakes is the “most advanced in the world,” according to Time magazine, and with the change, iPhones will be able to receive messages broadcast by the service that are pushed to devices by the carriers. Previously, third-party apps provided a similar function, but Apple’s making this a system-level tool will ensure that if users want to receive those notifications, they won’t have to make sure that an app is running in the background or that they have installed a specific app.

The iPhone is far from the first device on the Japanese market to plug into the earthquake-early-warning system. Feature phones in Japan have offered a similar ability for years. But it is a sign that Apple is willing to make modifications to its iOS software that are regionally specific when it comes to safety issues. Other places in the world, including Mexico, also have early-warning systems in place for earthquakes and other natural disasters like tsunamis and tidal waves. California is set to see its own early-detection system up and running sometime around 2013. Emergency notification alerts about things like wildfires that are triggered based on your device’s location might also prove effective in helping people steer clear of danger.

Apple probably can institute similar tools the world over, but whether it will is another question entirely. In Japan, the service is offered on many other devices, so there’s a clear precedent. In other parts of the world, such precedents might not exist, and such a system might even encourage some to sue or seek damages if warnings don’t work properly or fail to prevent injury.

Since people are turning more and more toward smartphones and away from broadcast sources for news and information, I think opt-in OS-level warning and notification systems for things like dangerous weather systems and natural disasters is a great idea. Here’s hoping this addition to iOS 5 is a first sign that Apple agrees.

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iMessage

iOS 5 features iMessage, which is a direct messaging platform that can replace text messages when used between iOS devices. You can send photos, videos, contact cards and more, and you also receive sent and read receipts. If you’ve used BBM  on a BlackBerry device, it’s very similar.

Apple did a great job with iMessage, but the fact that it’s missing from Lion doesn’t make any sense. Lion still comes with iChat, Apple’s IM client, but it doesn’t plug into iChat. It’s great being able to receive messages from mobile devices across all your iOS hardware, but if it could make the leap to the desktop, I could leave behind other IM services and maybe even leave my phone in my pocket more often when I sit down to do work.

Facebook and Google are likely to be battling for the true cross-messaging pie, and this would be a perfect opportunity for Apple to leverage its user base to get in on that action, too. Let’s hope it comes with an update to Lion once it’s released.

Notification Center

Everyone’s impressed with the new notifications system on the iPhone, myself included, but this is another place where I’m left wondering why Apple didn’t borrow more from iOS in the design of OS X Lion.

OS X has no native cross-app notification system, although the third-party system extension Growl does the job nicely. But I’d love to see Notification Center on the desktop, and I’d love to see it be able to tie into iMessage and your other accounts. Receiving a notice once and seeing it on whatever device you happen to be using at the moment would be ideal. Especially if a Mac Notification Center could also display content like missed calls from your iPhone, though that might require more cooperation from carriers than Apple can secure.

Apple’s latest software updates are very impressive, and that’s why the above two items are really the only things I can think of that are lacking at the moment. But those last two pieces would make for a much more complete picture, so I’m still hoping to see them arrive somewhere down the road.

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What was your favorite announcement?

Rich Siegel, founder and CEO of Bare Bones Software Inc., which makes Yojimbo: The amount of user-facing work that’s going into Lion and iOS 5 is truly impressive, especially as it reflects an enormous amount of infrastructure work.

Gedeon Maheux, Principal / Designer at The Iconfactory, which makes Twitterific: We’re most excited about all of the potential in iOS 5, such as Apple’s new iCloud API. Hopefully synching Twitter timeline positions across multiple copies of Twitterrific will work with relatively little effort.

Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group: I’m really looking forward to updating our document-based apps (OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle . . . ) to leverage iCloud’s document syncing.

David Frampton, founder of Majic Jungle Software, which makes Chopper and Chopper 2: AirPlay Mirroring. I wasn’t expecting that, as it seems a pretty amazing technical achievement. Not sure on the details yet, but it could be a big deal for gaming.

Layton Duncan, founder of Polar Bear Farm, which makes Air Forms: By far iCloud, specifically Photo Stream. Photos across multiple devices, iPhone, laptop and desktop have been a real pain point for a while. It’s nice to have something to now sync consistently and transparently across all my devices.

What were you not expecting to see?

Maheux: Personally I’m excited about iMessage as a potential replacement for the aging application iChat and the newly redesigned notification system in iOS.

Case: Reminders in iOS 5 looks good! Glad to see Apple providing it as important baseline functionality (and challenging us to take things further).

Siegel: When they announced iTunes music storage, my immediate question was, “But what about music that I *didn’t* buy from iTunes?” The answer to that comes as iTunes Match, which was a pleasant surprise for me.

What was the most overdue announcement?

Frampton: Fixing the notification system. It’s been pretty bad, so it’s great to see that they’ve made some major improvements.

Duncan: Absolutely the notifications overhaul. They have been terrible in iOS for a long time. Now it looks like they finally have a scalable solution.

What new feature is going to have the biggest long-term impact?

Duncan: To me it’s the iCloud document syncing. It’s a feature that in the future you’ll not necessarily notice day-to-day because it just happens, but won’t be able to live without.

Siegel: It’s really impossible to fully gauge the developer impact just yet, but these user-facing features are exciting developments, and they’re backed by a huge number of new APIs. As the week goes on I expect to have a better sense of how we can employ the internal developents to make better software.

Frampton: iCloud is a big deal. It takes a bunch of totally separate devices and unifies them, which I think will permanently change the way we view and use them.

Anything that worries you?

Frampton: Apple announced a number of new apps and features that totally obsolete many third-party apps. This has caught a number of developers off guard, and there is no guarantee they won’t obsolete other apps and business models in the future. In fact, they certainly will.

Duncan: There were some concerns with new features, specifically the Reminders app, which seems to directly compete with developers, with no real reason, given it’s a feature that doesn’t need to be deeply integrated into the OS. Secondly, the use of the volume button as a camera button, given the history of that feature in Tap Tap Tap’s Camera+ app [it was introduced to Camera+ as a hidden feature, which prompted Apple to pull the app from the App Store for many months].

Siegel: Nah. :-)

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Good Bets

I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I’d put money on just a scant few changes for iOS 5. It’s not that I don’t think iOS 5 will bring big changes; in fact, it should be one of the most significant updates for Apple’s mobile OS since its introduction, due to increased competition from Android and the possibility we won’t see any new iPhone hardware Monday. But Apple has done a good job of keeping a tight lid on any details about iOS 5, so there’s precious little to base predictions on.

New Notifications. Apple will probably change the way notifications work and appear on iOS. I argued a while ago that Apple’s notification system was perfectly adequate for most users in its existing form, but as competition grows in the mobile space, they’re starting to look decidedly old-fashioned. Apple will change how they work, but what changes are in store remain up in the air. Look for a central notification history screen, at the very least, so they aren’t lost to the ether once dismissed as they are now. iOS app Boxcar provides a pretty good example of how better native notifications could work.

iCloud Integration. Apple is unveiling a suite of cloud services bundled under the iCloud trademark. It stands to reason we’ll see iCloud hooks built-in to iOS itself, and an iOS-style icon spied on a banner at the WWDC venue seems to reinforce that assumption. iCloud integration in iOS 5 could be what those early rumors of Photo Stream and Media Stream features are all about, and will likely handle syncing up your digital life via email, contacts and calendars as well. Look out for some surprising additional x-factor features, too, since Apple has to make a big splash with iCloud to make it a runaway success.

AirDrop. This is an announced OS X Lion feature that lets Mac users automatically and easily share files with other AirDrop-enabled computers nearby, without setup. So far, Apple hasn’t said anything about AirDrop coming to iOS devices, but easy wireless file sharing between devices is something iOS users have been looking for in third-party apps like Bump for a long time. Apple has a golden opportunity to increase cross-platform integration by bringing it to mobile.

Interesting Possibilities

These are things that have popped up on the radar, but either because they’re somewhat extreme, or because there isn’t much backing them up, they remain little more than exciting teases at this point.

Twitter Integration. As per my article earlier today, the Twitter-iOS integration rumor is gaining traction in some influential circles, and for good reason: OS-level Twitter support would make direct social media interaction on the iPhone much more of a reality, and could give Apple a leg up on the competition. Such a close partnership would be a big step for Apple, however, which tends to shy away from such arrangements, so we’ll have to wait and see just how close they’re willing to get.

Widgets. Along with new notifications, rumors have been circulating that widgets will get introduced in iOS 5. These would provide live, updating information directly on the home screen, and go way beyond the badge notifications iOS currently offers. Android already has widgets, and Apple’s own native Calendar app icon updates automatically as the day changes. Apple should and likely will provide live updating content to the home screen, but don’t expect its approach to resemble Android’s.

Spaces. Home screen management on iOS devices got a lot easier with the introduction of Folders and the ability to reshuffle your icons and screens in iTunes, but it could be easier still. An iOS version of Spaces, which Apple has already patented, would do a great deal to make managing your iOS “desktop” easier still. Even just the ability to quickly rearrange the scrolling order of home screens would be a big usability boost.

Far-Fetched, but Awesome

I would love these to be true, but there’s little or no indication that they are, unfortunately.

Facebook Integration. While Twitter integration is being talked about by some fairly reliable sources, Facebook integration isn’t. Apple has had a rocky relationship with Facebook in the past, thanks to trouble with Ping at launch. But Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg did meet for dinner once, and who knows what they discussed there?

Live Lock Screen. Apple’s iOS lock screen doesn’t do much beyond telling you the date and time, and in the opinion of many users, that’s a waste. If Apple added a better notification system to the lock screen, or provided a way for third-party apps to display live updating information from RSS or Twitter source, for instance, it would be a lot more useful. Even if Apple just let you display the current weather on the lock screen, it would be a huge improvement.

What do you want from iOS 5? Feel free to point out anything I’ve missed here, or your own suggestions for what features would really make Apple’s next platform revision also its most ground-breaking yet.

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In order to change which apps can send you notifications, open your device’s Settings app, then tap Notifications. In here, you’ll find a list of all the apps you have installed which are able to send notifications, as well as a switch to turn off all notifications at once. However, I don’t recommend killing all notifications, since you’ll probably want important ones, such as those from to-do list apps to remind you of deadlines, to stil show up.

To edit what notifications a certain app will send, tap its name in the list. You’ll see up to three switches — Sounds, Alerts and Badges — depending on what options the app supports. From here you can choose how you’d like the app’s notifications to behave. Alerts is the option you’ll want to switch off if you’d like to stop the blue message boxes appearing. Badges determines whether an app should show a number badge (in a red circle) on its home screen icon. And sounds, as the name implies, controls whether or not you’ll get an auditory notice when a new notification arrives.

In my opinion, for an application which isn’t important, the best thing to do is turn off alerts and sounds, and just leave badges on. That way, you’ll still be able to tell which apps need your attention by glancing at their icons, but they won’t pester you with alert messages.

I much prefer the iOS experience without having to tap on a blue message box every three minutes. Adding the option to turn them off was a good decision on Apple’s part, and one that it pays to know how to use.

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