IOS – Custom notification size on iPhone

I understand your frustration, thankfully, it can be done.

Many video apps, like the YouTube app or the iTunes U App allow you to play the content in the background like music, it just takes a certain trick. The way you do it is two ways, depending on if you want to sleep your iPhone or use other apps while you listen:

Exit the App and then double click the home button, and then swipe to the right to reveal the iPod controls, you should see the youtube or iTunes U app in the place of the iPod Music Icon. Hitting play should continue playing the contents audio in the background while you do other things. Opening another music or sound related app may mute or stop the playing but opening up Safari or checking your mail, text messages, etc should not stop anything.

To have it play in the background with your iPhone in standby mode, i.e., like listening to your music while your iPhone is sleeping. Simply lock your iPhone, the sound will stop. Double click the home button and the iPod controls will show up, press the play button and the audio portion of your iTunes U or Youtube app content should keep playing.

I hope that this information helps you out.

I'm a Mac OS X developer and I just finished adding Notification Center support to my app. For what it's worth, here's what I found out:

• By default, notifications (the alerts) are NOT shown if the application is already frontmost (this explains why alerts refuse to show up sometimes, and you only see the notification in Notification Center). This is up to given applications to overwrite and it is not very straightforward, so do expect most applications to not show notifications when they're active. In my opinion, this is very annoying.
• The application, after sending a notification still has a lot of control over that given notification. It can remove it from your screen at any time it wants, regardless of the settings you have. Basically, if Safari, for some reason was set to remove notifications after X seconds, it will do that, your settings do not matter.

I have no idea if this is a bug in Safari or Notification Center, or both. However, I am fairly confident that there is nothing you can do about the second issue (there might be a hidden defaults setting for the first one, but I haven't heard of it). I did check the WebKit API Specification, to make sure it's not something that the individual websites are doing, and you can rule out websites from your suspect's list, because they do not have any control over the notifications.

I guess we'll have to wait and see if Apple will address this in its next bug fix release (10.9). However, by the looks of it, not showing notifications when the app is frontmost is a "feature", so don't get your hopes up.