Android Tutorial

By : Ketan Bhimani

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providing a themed or branded appearance.

Note

The default layout includes two fields of text: an icon and a time

field for when the notification was triggered. Users are accustomed

to this information. An application, where feasible and where it

makes sense, should try to conform to at least this level of

information when using custom notifications.

Designing Useful Notifications

As you can see, the notification capabilities on the Android platform

are quite robust—so robust that it is easy to overdo it and make

your application tiresome for the user. Here are some tips for

designing useful notifications:

 Only use notifications when your application is not in the foreground. When

in the foreground, use Toast or Dialog controls.

 Allow the user to determine what types (text, lights, sound, vibration) and

frequency of notifications she will receive, as well as what events to trigger

notifications for.

 Whenever possible, update and reuse an existing notification instead of

creating a new one.

 Clear notifications regularly so as not to overwhelm the user with dated

information.

 When in doubt, generate “polite” notifications (read: quiet).

 Make sure your notifications contain useful information in the ticker, title,

and body text fields and launch sensible intents.

The notification framework is lightweight yet powerful. However,

some applications such as alarm clocks or stock market monitors

might also need to implement their own alert windows above and

beyond the notification framework provided. In this case, they may

use a background service and launch full Activity windows upon