When Apple officially launched the public version of iOS 5 alongside the iPhone 4S in October 2011, the new and improved system wide notification system was generally perceived as a much needed and long overdue addition to the operating system. Previous versions of iOS came with an extremely ugly, and intrusive way of handling notifications by slapping a big blue alert view onto the device’s screen. Not only was this system not in-keeping with the beauty of the OS, but it also provided a terrible user experience, with the alert view making sure that the user was interrupted in whatever they were doing.
