Soft notifications
Soft Notifications are reminders that inform the user of events that have occurred in the user’s absence, or while the user was busy with some application. Text, and also graphics, can be used to communicate the message to the user. Soft notifications are displayed in
The user can respond to the soft notification by using the softkeys. The left softkey is used for activating a function, for example opening a message that has arrived. The right softkey is used to discard the notification without taking any further action.
Figure 5-42. A soft notification indicating the arrival of voice messages.
Soft notifications are displayed only in idle state. If an event that causes a soft notification (for example a missed call) occurs when an application is active, it may cause other kinds of UI events to notify the user, but if the user does not react to these, the soft notification appears only after the phone is put in idle state – if the event still requires it.
The application that launched a soft notification can control it and also discard it. It is possible to use the Applications key during a soft notification; in that case the soft notification disappears, but reappears when the user returns to idle state, unless the application responsible for it has discarded it.
Soft notifications can be displayed for the user in two different appearances:
Ungrouped soft notification
These notifications contain one piece of information each. The appearance of the notification window is the same as a note’s. The example in the previous figure is an ungrouped soft notification.
Grouped soft notification
Many different items of information can be combined into one soft notification where the items are displayed as a list. The user can pick up one of the items at a time and react to it. The appearance of this soft notification type is the same as a list query (see section Queries).
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