Notifications, how much is enough?

[embeoo]

Also the possibility to set up alerts in the app could be interesting;
- a certain player online

Stalked anyone lately?

Oh yes, why?

[eddyueue]

Notifications about new zones in your vicinity would be nice.

[matswes]

Most importent is to give the user fredom to chose what notification he/she wants

[mrlindvall]

Make it optional to choose. The more the merrier. As well as having an option with how often you'll get a notification on zones lost. You can't really go wrong as long as you add options that are disabled by default.

+1

[Drassen]

Interesting thoughts so far. keep em coming.

[AJ_]

Notifications are good! I already have them on zone lost form the TurfWidget. But if you did them I hope it would be almost instant push notifications.

My preference for zone lost notifications would be much like I believe the gmail notifications work. There is one setting to enabling notifications, and two sub settings; one for sound and an other to only "notify once". This way there is a sound the first time a mail arrives (zone is lost) and for subsequent mails only the notification count is updated. If the notification is dismissed, the next notification produces a sound again.

I would also like to see some notifications while the app is running. I think I have mentioned this before, but here we go again:

Taking zone: An "ongoing" (non dismissable) notification, preferably with some animation like "downloading".

Zone taken: A regular notification (dismissable) that is auto dismissed after a few minutes, or replaced when next zone is taken.

Zone blocked: Similar to "taking zone" but displayed as long as you are inside the blocked zone.

With these notifications an experienced Turfer can play the game from the lock screen or other app (ingress ), and those pesky modal dialogs in the app can be removed or made optional. You might think that there are already a toast window for "taking zone", but that is not a good way to show an ongoing event. And there is also a sound, but that one has both volume and channel issues, and may not be preferred by the user.

If you don't want to implement this, you could perhaps broadcast some custom intents from the app, and I'll see what I can do with it.