This might be the best new Android 5.1 feature yet. Lollipop brought with it so-called heads up notifications, where the entire notification appears at the top of your screen momentarily when it first arrives. The problem was that you had only three options:

Wait until it goes away

Tap on it to open up the app notifying you

Swipe it away, making the notification disappear permanently

With this feature addition to Android 5.1, you can swipe up to get it out of your way without losing it entirely. Notifications, for many of us, are kind of like a mini to-do list. Just because we don't want to act on the notification right away doesn't mean we wanted to get rid of it. Take a look at things in action, thanks to our good friend Ramit Suri:

This was found in a Google Groups discussion in which somebody submitted a patch to add this function. However, the submitter was informed by a Googler that it had been patched internally already:

Agreed that it makes sense. In fact, it was called for in the original design, but just didn't make it into the L release. Thank you, Sabastiano for writing a fix. The code looks correct, unfortunately (fortunately?) the issue has already been fixed internally, so we won't be able to use this particular patch.

I'm certainly not going to get upset about who gets credited with the fix, I just can't wait to get it.