And here comes iOS 5, “an incredible leap for developers and customers alike,” says Scott Forstall.

“For devs, more than 1500 APIs and tools. Users get more than 200 new features.”

Apple wants to highlight ten features today. First up, though, is the biggie we’ve heard rumored: notifications.

iOS 5 is getting revamped notifications support with annoying pop ups and push notifications. They serve 100 billion push notifications a year.

The new method of dealing with notifications is called Notification Center. You can access your notifications anywhere, without interruption, by swiping your finger down from the top of the display. This is a direct swipe from Android.

Any notification that comes from apps now pops up at the top of the screen, and Apple’s added it to Stocks and Weather.

It all looks almost exactly like Mobile Notififer, and what do you know? Peter Hajas went to work at Apple.

Notifications also go to the lock screen, and allow you to see what’s going on at a glance.

Wow. Mobile Notifier was basically bought wholesale by Apple, huh? This is a big step up for iOS.