Buried at the tail end of a post on murmurs that Apple's been inviting press from around the world to come to the WWDC keynote, TechCrunch claims that Apple will be using that time to introduce "completely revamped notifications and widgets."
This is not the first time Apple's notification system has been rumored to be getting a re-work, which is what makes this interesting. Rich Dellinger, who invented the notification for Palm's WebOS, quit following HP's acquisition of the company in order to return to his former employer, Apple. This stirred up expectations that Apple was looking to overhaul its existing system. A report in February then claimed Apple was working to acquire an iOS app maker tool, with the intent to somehow roll its notification tools into iOS.
Apple introduced push notifications as part of iOS 3.0 back in 2009. Since then, the system has remained largely unchanged in terms of how the pop-up messages are delivered to the end user. The message design itself also resembles that of the pop-up notifications that shipped with the first iteration of iOS; most contain an option to either hit an "OK" button and jump to that app, or cancel out of the message. Meanwhile, whatever application you're in becomes inaccessible until the message is addressed, something that's been considered a major shortcoming.