The TV show Lie to Me, a few weeks back (season 2, episode 3 to be exact) decided to take the lies just one step too far — they showed an iPhone where one of the characters could swipe between SMS notifications.

To the trained eye, of course, it was merely screenshots of standard model text dialogs over the Notes app, with swiping no doubt courtesy of the Photo App, and sound effects added in post. (The whole screen, not just the alert dialog, changed on swipe). However, it shows that even TV now has to work around the vexing lack of great notification handling on the iPhone.

Sci-fi aside, it does show one possible approach. If instead of that nasty little box you had to cancel or reply to immediately, or risk losing forever, Apple let you swipe back to see previous notifications, would that be a good solution? Or are we still holding our breath (and turning ever-bluer) waiting or a Palm webOS- or Google Android-level solution?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TV Show Lie to Me Lies to Us About Swipe-able iPhone SMS Notifications

Crunchgear is reporting that Till Schadde of Equinux has been noticing some weirdness with his AIM app and push notifications. Namely, Schadde has been seeing his AIM messages go to random recipients. He discovered this by being notified that a message he had sent to his iPhone version of AIM was redirected to a random stranger. That stranger then contacted Schaddle to let him know and to supply him with a screen shot of his message.

In the past, TiPb has speculated that there are indeed some issues with hacktivated iPhones. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with “hackivation”, it’s simply a process that tricks an iPhone into believing it has authorized itself with Apple via iTunes and is ready to be used, but is actually activated by other, non-Apple software.

These hacktivated iPhones are not being assigned a unique push ID by Apple the way iTunes activiated iPhones with legit SIMs are. One of our readers, Greg, summed it up best in the comments from our last push notification issue post:

The difference is hacktivation, not jailbreaking. There’s a fair bit of crypto involved in the activation process and the “fixes” so far involve taking certs from other phones. This will only work for so long; eventually people are going to have to be on official carriers and paying official plan rates for Push and YouTube and who knows what they’ll cert off in 3.1 or 4.0?

The Dev Team seem to be working on a fix but it does not appear it will come anytime soon as they’ve avoided even posting a fix on their blog. Instead, they quietly posted a link on their Twitter page to a very beta fix.

All of this is yet another part of the cat and mouse game, but it’s important to try and understand what’s going on: normal iPhone users should have nothing to worry about at this time.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

AIM Push Problems – Hacktivated iPhones to Blame?

In similar fashion to the patent for a today screen, Apple Insider is reporting Apple’s new filing shows a way of displaying icon-like status indicators on the iPhone’s display even though the phone is locked with the backlight not turned on. Apple seems to be paying attention lately to alerts/notifications and that is great news!

Apple proposes the implementation of a dual backlight system, where a secondary, low-power backlight system would be positioned behind the primary backlight system. The always-on light provided by the secondary backlight system could then be projected through one or more transparent or semitransparent regions of the primary backlight system to reach the display even when the primary backlight is turned off.

The lack of a feature similar to this is one of the current iPhone’s biggest complaints. You leave your iPhone on a table and you walk out of the room for 5 minutes… during that time you get a email or missed call… you get sidetracked and don’t turn your phone on… you never know that a message is waiting for you. No blinking LED, no second audible alerts (unless it’s a SMS message), nothing. That is a major gripe that I hear over and over regarding the iPhone.

So as soon as this is actually a reality, it will give the haters one less reason to complain. It’s just too bad we will all have to wait until a future iPhone to see this feature.

[Via Apple Insider]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Patent Watch: Always-on iPhone Status Indicators