All of those “Hey you!” messages collect on a single screen called the Notification Center (Figure 11-3).
Figure 11-3. Right: Here’s the Notification Center, where all those incoming messages pile up, for your inspection pleasure.
To make it appear on a laptop, swipe two fingers onto the trackpad from the right. (Start the swipe off to the right of the trackpad. It’s the first time you’ve ever crossed the edge of the trackpad with a Mac gesture. Weird.)
You can also open the Notification Center by clicking the in the upper-right corner of your screen. That’s a handy trick if your Mac doesn’t have a trackpad—if it’s an iMac, for example. (You can also set up a keystroke or a “hot corner” to open the Notification Center, if you like. See Tip and Note.)
Either way, the Notification Center slides onto the screen like a classy gray window shade, showing every recent item of interest.
To close the Notification Center, swipe the opposite way (left to right) with two fingers. Or just click any other part of the screen. Or click the again. Or press the Esc key. Or just blink really hard.
The Notification Center has two tabs at the top:
Today. On the Today tab (Figure 11-4), you see today’s weather, all your upcoming appointments and reminders, and an assortment of widgets (calculator, stock report, news headlines) that you’ve installed there. (More on this in a moment.) You also see the answers to any Siri queries that you decided to pin here, as described in Tip.
Notifications. This tab lists all your apps’ notifications, as well as all your Mac’s messages, reminders, upcoming appointments, and so on.
Each produces a scrolling panel; read on.
Figure 11-4. Editing the widgets of the Today list is simple enough. The left column represents what’s in the Today list now; the right column lists widgets that aren’t installed at the moment. Click to remove a widget from the Today list, or tap to add a module.
The Today panel presents an executive summary of everything you need to know today, in plain English: your upcoming appointments (“ ‘Personnel meeting’ is next up on your calendar, at 2 PM”); reminders coming due; weather and stock information; and a preview of your schedule tomorrow. It’s identical to the Today panel on the iPhone or iPad, if you’re scoring at home.
To add, remove, or rearrange widgets, click Edit at the bottom of the panel; proceed as described in Figure 11-4.
Intriguingly, Apple also allows apps to add their own sections to the Today list. For example, Dropbox can show a list of files that have been added to your Dropbox folder; Evernote can add buttons for creating new notes or reminders; The New York Times, Yahoo Digest, and Huffington Post apps can add headlines; the Kindle app offers links to the books you’re reading right now; and so on.
On the Notifications tab (Figure 11-3, right), you can have two kinds of fun:
Click an item to open the relevant app for more details. For example, click an appointment listed there to open its information panel in Calendar. Click the name of a software update to open the Mac App Store program to read about it and download it. Click a message’s name to open Mail, where you can read the entire message.
Click the little to dismiss one day’s entire list of notifications—or one app’s worth—once you’ve seen them. (The appears when you point to a notification.)
So which is it—all the notifications from one app? Or from one day? That’s up to you. It depends on how you’ve set things up in System Preferences→Notifications, as described in the next section. For example, if you’ve chosen to sort your notifications by Recents, then the button deletes a day of notifications; if you’ve chosen Recents by App, it deletes all the notifications from a particular app.
You can (and should) specify which apps are allowed to junk up your Notification Center. Open System Preferences→Notifications to see the list of apps that might want to get your attention in the master Notifications list (Figure 11-5).
A faster way to get to the proper System Preferences pane is built right into the Notification Center itself. Click the tiny at the very bottom of the panel.
Out of the box, a lot of macOS programs are listed in the Notification Center (along with Do Not Disturb, described starting in Insta-Respond to Bubbles). Here are some of the most significant:
Calendar lets you know about imminent appointments.
Facebook governs the appearance of updates from your Facebook friends.
Messages lets you know when somebody has sent you an instant message.
Other companies’ apps may appear in this list, too: BusyCal, Evernote, Skype, and so on.
Now it’s time to change the settings for one app at a time. Click an app’s name to see its individual Notifications settings (Figure 11-5—the Calendar app, in this case).
For example, as hinted above, different apps can get your attention in different ways:
None. If certain apps seem to bug you with news you really don’t care about, you can make them shut up forever. They won’t bother you with pop-up messages, although they can still insert items into the Notification Center panel.
Banners. This option (Figure 11-5) makes incoming notifications slide quietly and briefly onto the top right of your screen. Each message holds still long enough for you to read it, but it goes away automatically after a few seconds. Banners are a good option for things like Facebook and Twitter updates and incoming email messages.
Alerts. These notifications don’t go away until you click a button to dismiss them. Good for important messages, like alarms and flight updates.
At the bottom of the Notifications window, you get more settings for each app:
Show notifications on lock screen. Do you want summaries of all your missed notifications to appear on your Lock screen (“5 email notifications”) when you wake the Mac after having been away? It’s a great feature, as long as you don’t mind passing busybodies knowing how popular you are.
Show in Notification Center: __ Recent Items. This pop-up menu specifies how many rows of information you want to reserve for this app in the Notification Center: one from your Scrabble app, for example, but all 20 of your recent Reminders.
When you visit the customizing screen shown in Figure 11-5, you see the widgets available to install onto your Today tab. One of them, Social, is worth special note. If you install it onto your Today tab, you get, at the top, buttons that let you send a Messages or LinkedIn message, post a tweet, or post a Facebook item (Figure 11-6).
When you click one of these buttons, you get the little pop-up card illustrated in Figure 11-6.
And what do these buttons have to do with notifications? Absolutely nothing. They’re here in the Notification Center because Apple wanted them to be available anytime, anywhere, no matter what program you’re using—and the Notification Center is a perfect always-available dashboard.