The Notification Center

All right, now you know how to dismiss, stifle, or respond to notification bubbles. But what if you miss one? Or you decide to act on it later?

Thought you’d never ask.

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.

Tip

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:

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.

Each of these little info-panels is called a widget, and there are tons of them available. For example, the Mac comes with ones called Calculator (puts a calculator at your fingertips), Social (lets you post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Messages—instantly, no matter what you’re doing on your Mac); and Find My Friends, which lets you see on a map where your loved ones are (this presumes that they have iPhones and have permitted you to track them).

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:

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).

This is also the place where you can specify the order of the various apps’ notifications in the center. Use the “Notification Center sort order” pop-up menu at the bottom of the window.

If you choose Recents, the apps with the newest alerts appear at the top. If you choose Recents by App, the notifications are grouped under headings that correspond to the app generating them. And if you tap Manually by App, you can simply drag the app names up or down in the list to specify their top-to-bottom order on the Notification Center list.

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:

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:

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).

Now such posts are available right from there, without your having to open an app or go to a web page.

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.