Edible Apple

System-wide notifications is one area where iOS certainly lags behind the competition. Whereas notifications on WebOS for example are elegant and unobtrusive, Apple’s implementation stops everything your doing with a pop up that must be acknowledged and dealt with before being able to return to your task at hand.

Rumor has it that Apple with iOS 5 will showcase a completely revamped iOS notification scheme and they may have tapped the creator of MobileNotifier, Peter Hajas, to help them out. For those of you unaware, MobileNotifier is an elegant notification system that alerts users of new notifications without halting their current activity. The interesting point here is that MobileNotifier is an app that was only available via Cydia for jailbroken iPhones

Whispers of the hire began a few days ago, when Hajas announced that he was “taking a break from MobileNotifier… for a while”. He couldn’t give a reason for his hiatus, but added that “it’s worth it. Trust me. If you look around hard enough, you’ll probably figure it out.”

Ever so coyly, he signed the post with “Until then, stay hungry and stay foolish”, an ultra-geeky reference to Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement speech.

So, a subtle quoting of Apple’s CEO — could be a hint, could just be a rather strange choice of references. Not really enough to go on, either way. Then Redmond Pie dug up the following tweet sent by Hajas, which has since been deleted:

@brittaahh I’m glad you like it! I’ll see what I can do 🙂 I will be back for a few weeks, then I’m off to work in CA at a “fruit” company.

Ah yes, a “fruit” company. Something tells us that Hajas isn’t going to Cali to sell Oranges. Indeed, it’s almost become common parlance to refer to Apple, in a thinly veiled attempt to be discreet, as a fruit company of some sort. When Apple hired security expert Ivan Krstic in 2009, he relayed via twitter that he was going to work for a California “fruit vendor.”

Circumstantial evidence aside, Hajas confirmed his recent employ at Apple via Facebook when he added “Apple” to his list of employers. His position? Intern.

So, why “Intern”? It’s par for the course with Apple. They seem to consider it something of a dry run; sort of their way of testing how well newbies mesh with the current talent and how skilled they actually are before giving them access to source code repositories or a fancy title. Of the many Apple iOS/OS X developers I’ve met over the years, every one of them started off as “Intern”.

Not bad, not bad. Another iOS notification mockup that we like even more can be seen here.

via MobileCrunch