How-to: Get the awesome Notification Peek feature from Paranoid Android without flashing ROMs

Always crafty, the developers of Paranoid Android custom ROM for Android devices are on the look for subtle ways to improve the OS' user experience. One of them is the Notification Peek feature, which basically shows the gist of your most recent notifications in a energy-conservative setting on your device's display.

See, instead of shock-waking the whole device just to show you the latest SMS or Tweet, Notification Peek displays a minimalistic view of it on a black background, and puts the device back to sleep after a preset time. Not that this is a panacea for conserving battery juice, but every little bit helps, right?

Thanks to Computer Science student Zhe Lu's porting efforts, you won't have to flash Paranoid Android just to get this particular feature. You can just side-load it as an APK right into your favorite ROM, and enjoy a relatively stable functionality. While some users are reporting force closings of the app, these incidents could be related to completely different things, so worry not for now.

Here are the simple steps to a different, and probably better notification experience than what you have at the moment:

1. Download the Notification Peek APK on your device from its GitHub page right here, and install it.

2. Open the app when asked, and enable all its settings - you are going to want to use them, right?

3. Fire up a test notification to check if it works correctly and the preset time-out suits your usage. If it doesn't, you can choose a different time-out from the Settings menu.

If everything worked as advertised, you should be enjoying functionality similar to what's shown in Paranoid Android's demo video below.