In a post on his blog, designer Dan Provost addresses an issue that I’ve had some issues with in the past, the way that the iPhone handles SMS requests. The way that the SMS app handles an incoming request now is extremely inefficient and irritating. Dan came up with a simple, clean concept for making the iPhone experience even better.
Currently, if you receive a text message while you’re using an app, and you decide to reply to that SMS immediately, you’re at the mercy of the app’s developers. If they decided that it was a good idea to have the app save it’s state on any exit event, you’re fine, you can hit reply, reply to the text and then re-launch the app, returning to where you left off. It’s not an ideal solution, but it does work. However, if the app is one of the many that does not save it’s state on the interruption of a core app like SMS, then you have no choice but to decline the message until you can finish what you’re doing in the app and get back to it. This is ludicrous.
Dan thought so too, so he came up with this sweet concept for making core apps like Messages run in the foreground. Much talk has been made about the iPhone not running apps in the background, but the truth is that all of the core apps are running all the time, at least portions of them are, so that when you receive a message, there is an app running to recieve and display the message to you. In this concept, the apps would simply be brought to the foreground, popping up in front of your currently running app so that you could reply to the message, or confirm the calendar appointment etc and then return to your currently scheduled programming without a hitch.
It’s one of the cleanest solutions I’ve seen to this annoying issue so far:
There actually already is a way to combat this problem if your iPhone is Jailbroken, with the QuickReply ($1.99) app from the Cydia app store. QuickReply allows you to view the message or just tap the reply button to open a transparent window on top of the currently running app, allowing you to type out your reply.
If your iPhone isn’t Jailbroken however, you’ll just have to wait and see if Apple like’s Dan’s Idea as much as I do and includes it in their next update.
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