14 DAY TRIAL // During a routine test yesterday on iCloud.com, Apple accidentally displayed a new type of service status notification indicating a switch from the pop-up style banners originating from older versions of iOS.
Some iCloud users accessing the service through their web browsers received the following message yesterday:
“Default Title for English English - This is a test message description”
It is known that OS X Mountain Lion will include the same type of banners via Notification Center, also a feature borrowed from iOS.
In fact, OS X 10.8 borrows a large number of features from Apple’s mobile operating system. Notification Center is one of the main attractions, if you will.
With iCloud working on any modern web browser without requiring Mac OS X, there’s a pretty solid chance Apple is trying to unify the customer’s experience across platforms by including as many native features as possible. Notification Center seems to be one of them.
iCloud features old-style notifications from iOS iterations preceding version 5.0. iOS 5, which was the first to implement a new type of alerts based on a concept licensed to Apple last year, brings Notification Center. OS X Mountain Lion features it as well.
Image #2 (click to enlarge) shows what the feature is all about.
“See what’s new with you. All in one place. Something new is always popping up somewhere on your Mac — an email, an instant message, a friend request, a calendar alert, and more,” Apple explains on the Mountain Lion marketing page.
“Notification Center makes it easy to stay up to speed, because there’s one place to see everything. Notification banners appear on your desktop and disappear quickly so they don’t interrupt what you’re doing,” Apple adds. “Swipe to the left, and you’ll see all your notifications in a simple, ordered list. So you’ll always know what’s up as soon as it comes up.”
