The status bar should be treated with respect. It drives me nuts when it is abused, and it can give delight when it is used well. One of the lil hacks I really liked came from Joel Bernstein when in developer mode only, you get to see if you are talking to dev, qa, or production servers! Delightful Joel.
But then I saw this…
… the Olympics app takes over my status bar to show a sponsor? I am not allowed to know my battery life, the time, network situation, and if the app is going back to get data and instead I get…. an ad? You have to be kidding me guys.
Feel free to use it in a temporal way to give me updates such as Twitter does these days:
But please, don’t take away my info without giving me something back.
(The apps are pretty bad in general. They are buggy and flaky, have been “updated” daily, the video goes in and out a lot, and the content isn’t that good. Meh.)
