[mortenjorck]

Good process leading to this, even if I disagree with some of the conclusions. It's nice to see speculative designers actually considering (and then documenting) the environment their concepts would have to work and compete in, rather than just pushing out a cool-looking set of Dribbble mockups with no context.

I don't think Apple is going to add functionality to the home screen. It's always done one thing, and I imagine UX leads at Apple would probably consider anything else to be overloading its scope.

That said, there is absolutely a good use case for widgets on iOS. The old iOS 5-6 weather widget was great, and the text-adventure version they replaced it with in iOS 7 is an inferior experience. Notification Center is almost certainly the best place for widgets: The iOS 7 calendar widget is a great example of the potential, and I really hope they finally open up the NC widget APIs in iOS 8.

[Smudge]

I can't stand the notification center. Even in its current form it always seems overcrowded with stuff I don't care about. Opening up the API for any app to eat up even more real estate would, in my opinion, be extremely misguided. If anything it needs to be dumbed down even further.

There are two separate concerns here:

1. Notifications. Telling me that things have happened, when they happen. The notification center could (nay, should) excel at this, but currently it's only doing okay. I wish I didn't have to keep micromanaging my preferences to prevent apps from spamming me with useless stuff, but at least it works.

2. Persistent info. Stocks, weather, headlines, deadlines, etc. I don't want this stuff in the notification center. It gets in the way of everything coming at me from concern #1. I want to be able to find this elsewhere, without having to dig down into each app. And I definitely don't want apps trying to tell me persistent info in the form of a notification. I don't need to be notified that it's sunny out, or that something interesting (but not directly related to me, or actionable on my part) happened inside of one of my apps. But having to drill down into each individual app for this info is also a pain.

This is where I love Microsoft's live tiles. The ability to peek inside of an app from the homescreen is awesome (way better than having to add separate widgets, a la Android, each with their own design patterns and set of controls). I'd use Windows Phone for this reason if it had the same app ecosystem as iOS, but of course I wouldn't expect it to. Currently my primary device is running Android, which, for me, is a nice trade-off between app availability and base OS experience. But if iOS were to add that ability to "peek" into any existing app to see what's happening, I'd definitely consider switching back.