Notification center was introduced in iOS 5, and while it is definitely an improvement on what came before it, there are still a many areas where it could be improved upon. One of those areas is the ability to add new widgets, or swap out the default widgets. (Other fellow Australian’s can attest to how inaccurate the built-in weather app is on iOS). iOS 6 doesn’t seem to have solved many of these issues. In fact, apart from being able to update Facebook or Twitter via notification centre, the update seems very underwhelming. (as of beta 2)

These issues aside, there is a feature I’d like to see added that seems so brain-dead simple. Please add timers to notification centre! I, along with many other people use Siri in the kitchen constantly. “Set a timer for 10 minutes”, is a phrase you’ll always hear in my kitchen when I put a pot of pasta on to boil. In response to this command, Siri brings up a nicely animated egg timer animation.

If I return to the home screen, instead of s simple swipe from the top of the screen to see how long is left, I need to find the clock app, then switch to the timer application.

Notification centre is meant as a way to check useful info at a glance. Timers fit perfectly into this category and it seems like a trivial thing to add. Below is a very rough mockup of how I see this being implemented. Hopefully this will be added into the final iOS 6 release, or perhaps iOS 6.1?

Here is a Siri added timer:

Here is the current notification centre screen:

Here is a mockup of a hopeful future addition to iOS: