A notification is an important status message. On an iPhone, you get one every time a text message comes in, an alarm goes off, a calendar appointment is imminent, or your battery is running low.
iPhone apps use this mechanism, too. Nowadays, you get a message when your friends post updates on Facebook or Twitter. When your flight is two hours from takeoff. When a new Groupon discount becomes available. When your online Scrabble or chess partner makes another move.
It’s no different on your Mac. Mail and Messages might want to let you know that a new message has arrived. Game Center might want you to realize that it’s your move. The Calendar app might want to flag you that an important meeting is about to start.
In Mountain Lion, you’ll know when some app is trying to get your attention: A subtle message bubble slides into view at the top right of your screen (Figure 16-17, left). Some of these alerts slide away again after 5 seconds; others require you to click a button, like Close, Snooze, or Show (which opens the program that’s waving its little hands in your face).
Note
Only apps you got from the Mac App Store can tap into the Notification Center. Other programs will still use whatever alert mechanisms they always have—pop-up dialog boxes, for example.
But what if you miss one? Or you decide to act on it later? Thought you’d never ask.
On the iPhone or iPad, all of those “Hey you!” messages collect on a single screen called the Notification Center. So it occurred to somebody at Apple: Why should that handiness be confined to the phone?
In Mountain Lion, the Notification Center looks exactly the same as it does on the mobile devices (Figure 16-17, right).
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 Launchpad or 158.)
Figure 16-17. Left: In Mountain Lion, all Mac features get your attention in the same quiet, uniform way: with a bubble like this one. Right: Here’s the Notification Center, where all those incoming messages pile up, for your inspection pleasure.
Either way, the Notification Center slides onto the screen like a classy black window shade, printed in white with every recent item of interest; whatever was on your screen gets shoved temporarily off to the left side of your screen.
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.
Here you’ll find all your apps’ notifications, as well as all of your Mac’s messages, reminders, upcoming appointments, and so on.
Once the center is open, you can have three kinds of fun:
Scroll the list to see more of it.
Click an item in the Notification Center 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 app’s entire list of
notifications once you’ve seen them. (The app is free to fill up
your Notification Center again, once it has something to
say.)
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Shutting Up the Bubbles
You know what? The Notification Center is such a clever way of consolidating all the Mac’s messages, I don’t need the distraction of those message bubbles in the corner of my screen. Can’t they be shut up?
Yes, actually. Just Option-click the button in your menu bar. That stifles all
bubbles for the rest of the day (or until you Option-click it
again).
There’s also a longer method for slowpokes: open the Notification Center and scroll up. There, above the list of notifications, is a hidden on/off switch for those alerts and banners. You can always slide the switch back On when you’re ready to be bombarded.
Either way, when you’re hunkering down for a work session, feel free to shut alerts off. Your messages will quietly pile up in the Notification Center, but they won’t pop up on your screen individually as they happen.
And by the way: Notification Center automatically shuts up its alert bubbles whenever you’re giving a Keynote presentation from your Mac or are connected to a projector. Nothing worse than an audience of 500 witnessing the embarrassing subject lines of your incoming email.
If you’ve told Mountain Lion the details of your Twitter or Facebook accounts, then a strange little surprise awaits you at the top of the Notification Center: “Click to Tweet” and “Click to Post” (to Facebook) buttons. As you’d guess, these buttons let you post something to Twitter or Facebook right from there, without having to open some special app or going to the corresponding Web page.
Note
You can hide these buttons, if you like. Open System Preferences→Notifications, and turn off “Show share button in Notification Center” for each service.
When you click one of these buttons, you get the little pop-up card illustrated in Figure 5-10 on page 227.
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.
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 16-18).
Tip
A faster way to get to the proper System Preferences pane is
built right into the Notification Center itself. Click the tiny
icon at the very bottom of the
panel.
This is also the place where you can specify the order of the various apps’ notifications in the center. Use the Sort Notification Center pop-up menu at the bottom of the window. If you choose By Time, then the apps with the newest alerts appear at the top. But if you tap Manually, then 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, the following OS X programs are listed in the Notification Center:
Share Buttons lets you hide the “Click to Tweet” and “Click to Post” (Facebook) buttons at the top of the Notification Center.
Game Center flags you when somebody has invited you to a game or wants to become your friend.
Mail lets you know when you’ve received a new message. (Mercifully, Mail’s Preferences→General tab lets you limit these alerts, so you won’t be buried in a barrage of meaningless heads-up bubbles. You can tell Mail to alert you only when somebody in your Contacts list has written to you, only when a message lands in a smart mailbox folder, only when you get email from someone you’ve designated as a VIP—or whenever any message lands either in your Inbox or all mailboxes.
Messages lets you know when somebody has sent you an instant message.
Safari. Certain Web sites, if they’re open in Safari, can send you notifications (known as HTML Web notifications).
Figure 16-18. Here, in System Preferences, you can specify which apps are permitted to intrude on the precious billboard that is your Notification Center—and how they’re permitted to intrude. Individual apps, including Mail and Calendar, may offer additional controls in their Preferences boxes. For example, in Calendar, you can turn off notifications from shared calendars and from meeting invitations.
Twitter pops up whenever somebody has mentioned you on Twitter or tried to reach you with a direct message.
Facebook governs the appearance of updates from your Facebook friends.
Of course, other companies’ apps may appear in this list, too.
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 16-18—the Calendar app, in this example).
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. Tap None to squelch their notifications altogether. They won’t bother you with pop-up messages, although they can still insert items into the Notification Center panel.
Banners. This option is illustrated in Figure 16-17. It 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 doesn’t interrupt your work and goes away automatically after a few seconds. Banners are a good option for things like Facebook and Twitter updates, and incoming text and email messages.
Alerts. A message slides into the upper-right corner of your screen and doesn’t go away until you click a button to dismiss it. You might use this option for apps whose messages are too important to miss, like alarms and flight updates.
At the bottom of the Notifications window, you get three more settings for each app:
Show in Notification Center: __ Recent Items. Use this pop-up menu to specify how many rows of information you want to reserve for this app in the Notification Center. You might care to see only the one most recent message from your Scrabble app, but all 20 of your recent Reminders.
Tip
If you turn off this checkbox, the app disappears from the Notification Center completely. You can still get its alert messages, but you just won’t see them listed in the Notification Center panel.
Another way to achieve the same effect: Drag the app’s name down to the bottom of the list, below the Not in Notification Center heading.
Badge app icon. If you turn this option on, then each app’s actual icon (in your Launchpad and on your Dock) sprouts a red circled number, exactly as on the iPhone and iPad. This number lets you know how many times it’s tried to flag you about something. The number goes away once you’ve opened the app and dealt with whatever is bugging it.
Play sound when receiving notifications. Some apps play a sound when a new notification arrives. For example, Calendar dings to remind you of an upcoming event, and Game Center plays a sound when you get a friend request or game invitation. It’s a little extra insurance that you won’t miss a nudge, but here’s where you can turn these sounds off.
Tip
If this Notification Center thing gets you fired up, then you should probably know about Growl, too. It’s a free program that creates an effect very similar to Notification Center—but with far more customization. You can make the alerts appear in a different corner of your screen, for example, or change how they look. Growl is available on this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.