Edible Apple

Steve Jobs’ keynote is less than a few hours a way and the lines outside of WWDC are already, dare we say, insanely long.

iOS 5 is undoubtedly going to be a huge update for Apple’s mobile OS, and in addition to location-awareness and perhaps voice recognition features, one expected wrinkle in iOS 5 will be a completely retooled notification system. It’s no secret that Apple’s current scheme is somewhat intrusive and not nearly as elegant or practical as the notification system of other OS’s, such as HP’s WebOS.

But Apple is looking to change all that.

This past Summer Apple hired Rich Dellinger, a former Apple designer who briefly left the mothership for Palm where he helped design the notification system for WebOS. More recently, Apple hired Peter Hajas, the creator of MobileNotifier – an app for jailbroken iPhones that implements a much more streamlined and intuitive notification system.

So all that said, the photo above is a mockup courtesy of TechCrunch which sources in the know have intimated is along the “right idea” of what Apple has in mind for new iOS notifications.

Notifications that come down from the top bar could be how Apple ends up doing things in iOS 5. After all, this would mimic already existing functionality — when tethering, a blue strip appears along the top; when on the phone, it’s a green strip. Might notifications (or at least Twitter notifications) produce a gray strip?

It’s an improvement to be sure, but we can only hope that Apple has more up its sleeve than this. There are a number of iOS notification mockup videos that are just sick. In any event, we only have to wait a few more hours to find out. Apple’s WWDC keynote, spearheaded by Steve Jobs will get underway at 10AM Pacific Standard Time.