Gadgetory

some of the notifications that you receive are very important others not so much telling the difference between the two requires going to your notification shade pulling it down and dismissing the unimportant ones so you can hopefully find the important ones chat heads and other floating notifications style notifications try and tell you who it is it's trying to contact you quicker and faster so that you can determine if that is that important contact that you've been waiting for unfortunately up until now you've had to had either Facebook home or some other custom ROM or rooted app that enables this functionality for you today I want to show you one that requires neither let's go take a look this is my Nexus 4 it is routed but yours does not have to be I have just installed floating notifications and the first thing it tells me once I'm installed it and run it for the first time is that I need to turn on my accessibility options for this so I'm gonna go ahead and do that it's very simple you just go ahead and turn that on it tells you that by doing so it can collect the information that you type into text such as credit card information although that is a possibility it's really not likely it's just the method that you need to be able to do this now we are also familiar with that if I can get back over here on pebbles so there's my pebble smartwatch right there that also uses the notification and the accessibility schema if you will the service to get information over onto the watch the same way as this uses it to get it on to the floating notifications on your screen so once that is done then we can simply go back home scroll around a little bit and you'll notice everything looks just the same if I want to get to my notification shade I pull it down that's my current notifications and now we wait the first thing you'll notice is the app does put a notification on the screen for you I can move this around wherever I want just by tapping and dragging or I can set it there where after a few seconds of inactivity it tucks itself neatly off the side of the screen this is a notification from the app self saying hey the service is running it's doing what it's supposed to to dismiss it you simply tap on that it's all gone now to do what this is really supposed to do let's go ahead and send a Google hangout chat go ahead and do that you can see it comes across right over here I do get the notification up here in my notification bar but to get it I've got to pull it down and look at it here I can just tap from Michael Levi he says hi so we'll tap on that and it opens is right up into the conversation thread there are very few things that you can do to come in and customize the app but you really don't need to it does most of it for you coming in here will just launch the app we can choose a theme the one that you've been seeing has been default light if you are running a darker theme you can choose default dark underneath that you can change the icon size the default is 100 you can make that larger or you can make that smaller you can also change the font size larger or smaller as well just be advised the larger the font size the more of the screen it's going to cover up in the last of the message you're going to be able to see on extremely long messages you can change your animation settings and other stuff here don't show the the notification for the currently open app you're in it you don't need to see those notifications and then if you want to close the stack after pressing an action you can do that as well animation settings I've got mine set to dock a few seconds of inactivity after it's shown that alert so it'll just tuck those notifications right away for you just in case you're not looking at the the device itself when you get that notification next I don't have the fade after a few seconds of inactivity when the stack is closed I like having it there but that's really a personal preference choice the amount of the icon that is hidden when it's docked in my case and the default is 50% you can choose more or less you can also expose these on your lock screen I would however recommend that you hide the notification text when locked just in case that might be a little bit more private and you don't want people who are just picking up your device off your desk or whatnot to be able to see it Advanced Settings you need to be careful I haven't messed with them but there's a double tap threshold that you can set in there I don't know why that would be dangerous but you know whatever the version of floating notifications that we showed you here was alpha4 rc1 if you'd like to pick up that copy or if there's a newer version available head over to pocketnow.com the link is down in the description below we will provide a way for you to get the latest version of this app directly onto your device if you liked what you saw go ahead and share this information with your friends via your favorite social networking we've got links to all of ours down below for pocket now showing off notifications and cool things you can do with your Android I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching whew