The scoop comes courtesy of the Palm experts at PreCentral.net, who found the LinkedIn page for Rich Dellinger,Boss, Palm's former User Interface Design Architect, who (according to Dellinger's profile) "invented the non-intrusive banner notification system used in WebOS."
As PreCentral noticed, there's a new job title sitting atop Dellinger's resume: Senior User Interface Designer for Apple. There's no specific job description listed for Dellinger's new gig at Apple, which apparently began two months ago.
But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the former Palm employee will probably be rolling up his sleeves and digging into the iPhone user interface, potentially to add a feature that's been absent from the iPhone for far too long — integrated system notifications.
The way Palm's WebOS notifications work is that when you get a new email, text message, alarm, or voice call, a little banner bubbles up at the bottom of the screen, letting you know that a message or call has arrived; you also get buttons that let you open or ignore the alert. If you ignore a given notification, little icons begin to line up in the bottom corner of the screen, which you can tap to open.
The beauty of WebOS's notifications is that they appear even when you're working in an app or playing a game, but they don't rudely interrupt whatever you're doing; indeed, the alerts are subtle and "non-intrusive," as Dellinger puts it in his LinkedIn profile. (The Android OS also has a handy notification system, but personally, I prefer the more polished WebOS alerts.)
The iPhone, on the other hand, rips you out of any open app when a call comes in, or stops everything with a jarring pop-up when you get a text message. Another problem with the iPhone UI (at least for me): There's no icon tray to notify you of new emails or texts when you're not on the home screen.
Now that the iPhone OS — er, the iOS — is poised to get multitasking support, one of the last missing links is a notification system like Palm's, and where better to start (well, if you're Apple, and assuming such a feature is on the iOS roadmap) than by poaching the man who designed the alerts for WebOS?
Then again, maybe it's Palm that originally poached Dellinger from Apple, given that the UI designer was a six-year veteran at Apple when Palm scooped him up in 2006. Indeed, as the "User Interface Designer" for Apple from 2005 to 2006, Dellinger "designed applications for Apple products, including Mac OS X, iPod and " — you guessed it — "iPhone." Interesting.
Meanwhile, as PreCentral notes, Dellinger's departure from Palm represents another drip in the "brain drain" for the company, which has recently seen key execs defect to Twitter and Google. HP announced it was acquiring financially strapped Palm in late April.
PreCentral: Father of webOS notifications leaves for Apple
— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.
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One of the coolest features on Palm's WebOS handsets — and one that's conspicuously absent from the iPhone — is the elegant, unobtrusive notification system for incoming emails, text messages,Inflatable Obstacles, and voice calls. Well, guess who just got a new job at Apple? Yep: the guy who dreamed up Palm's innovative alert service.