Question

I know this has been asked before. However…

While until recently I thought that the only possible and accepted Alert is the text with 2 buttons I found some apps which have a different local alert.

So I assume there is an accepted way to customize the lokal Alert. Is this correct or have these apps just “slipped” into the store somehow – as I know this happened before with feature and then the app disappeared from the store suddenly.

I could not find anything about it.

Many thanks

Answer 1

As of iOS 5:

• When a UILocalNotification is delivered while the device is locked, it appears on the lockscreen with a swipe slider to open the app.
• If the notification is delivered while the device is in use, it can appear either as a banner across the top of the screen, or as an alert with two buttons.
  • One button is always a cancel button.
  • The other button opens the application. You can change the text of this button by setting the alertAction property.
  • You can disable this action button on the alert by setting hasAction = NO on the notification).

There are no other available ways a notification alert can arrive, unless of course the device is jailbroken. In that case, many things are possible.

Before iOS 5, only popup alert notifications were supported.

Due to the nature of iOS, it is technically not possible to deliver a notification in any other way, or customise the alert, as the notification delivery is handled by the system and the app has no access to the system UI, and so cannot display any messages by itself. And even if you did somehow manage that, Apple wouldn’t allow it.

Read the UILocalNotification docs here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/iPhone/Reference/UILocalNotification_Class/Reference/Reference.html for more detailed information.