iPhone notifications: Annoyingly not scalable

I love the iPhone’s UI, but there’s one part of it that I don’t like: those popup dialog boxes that take over the screen. I first got annoyed with this after leaving my phone at my apartment for a day while I was at work. Since I have it synced to my calendar, a reminder popped up every time I had a meeting that day. Since I wasn’t there to close out the messages as they came in, the next time I used my phone I had to sit there and tap “close” a bunch of times before I could do anything with my phone.

Last night, I turned on my iPhone for the first time in a while (I’ve been using Android) to try out the 3.0 software. After updating the OS, I had a bunch of apps which hadn’t been updated in a while. For each app I tried to update, I received a notification that the iTunes terms of service had changed. This bug (multiple notifications instead of one) would only be a minor annoyance if the UI didn’t require that the messages block the operation of the phone. I took a short video of having to tap through the notifications, which I’m embedding below. I actually had to tap “OK” a bunch more times, but the tape is corrupted so I wasn’t able to capture the whole segment:

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