Notifications can be tweaked on Mountain Lion to suit most any workflow.
Getting Mountain Lion's new system-wide notifications to work best for your own needs may take a little adjusting. Notification Center gives developers an (official) standardized way to send notifications to the user, but also a way to consolidate and control those notifications. We show you how to make the most of what this first desktop incarnation of Notification Center offers.
Apple provides system-wide notification APIs to developers, but it is up to them to support it. Apple has naturally included support in its own apps, such as Mail, Messages, and Reminders; Safari also supports notifications sent from webpages using the Web Notifications API. Some Twitter clients, such as the Tweetbot alpha, support notifications, but alas, the languishing official Twitter client does not. Other applications, such as Outlook 2011, still rely on their own notification system. Plenty of others rely on Growl, a popular third-party OS X notification system that thankfully can still run on Mountain Lion.
Taking control
Like iOS's Notification Center, configuration can be found in two places. The first stop is System Preferences, where there is a unified Notifications preference pane for controlling what style of notification an app uses, whether or not its messages are allowed to pile up in the Notification Center, and whether or not it can display a badge on its app icon or play a sound. Anyone familiar with iOS should be at home with these options.
The Notifications preference pane in System Preferences.
For each app, you can choose one of three "alert styles:" the self-explanatory "none;" "banners," which slide down from the top right corner of your main display, and disappear in a puff of smoke after a brief pause; and "alerts," which stay on the screen until you dismiss them. Think of banners as transient—best for information that you might want to know but isn't critical. Alerts stay pinned to the screen until you deal with them; these are best for important things like reminders or appointment alerts.
A banner style notification (left), compared to an alert style notification (right).
You can also tick a checkbox to optionally allow an app to play a sound or update an icon badge. For instance, you may not want a banner or alert to distract you from your work when updates from the Mac App Store become available, but you may want its Dock icon to show how many updates are available so you can check at a glance. And, if you're the sort that likes your computer to makes sounds (I admit, I'm one of them), you can control whether an app can play a sound when it sends an alert here as well.
Finally, you can have an app's notifications pile up in the Notification Center. You can control how many notifications will stay pinned there—just choose from 1, 5, 10, or 20 most recent. Again, this lets you check at a glance what's been happening to some background app while you were busy doing something else or away from the computer while banners were otherwise popping up and disappearing.
In all, the system is pretty flexible, and offers a lot of control over exactly how distracted you allow yourself to become.
The Notifications preference pane also allows you to control the sorting order of the Notification Center. You can have it sort automatically by time, placing the app with the most recent notification at the top, or manually. If you're using manual sorting, you control the order by dragging and dropping apps within the list in the preference pane. Again, this is quite similar to the functionality built in to iOS.
Fire when ready
Controlling exactly what events can trigger a notification, however, takes more work. You'll have to make a trip to a particular app's preferences, and here's where things get a little more tricky—it's up to a particular app's developer to give users the control they want. For instance, the Tweetbot alpha offers a lot of control over what kind of mentions fire of a notification. There's also an option to get an alert when someone starts following you, when your tweets get retweeted by others, and when someone marks a tweet as a "favorite."
Running under Mountain Lion, Tweetbot alpha offers several notification options.
Mail also offers configurable control over alerts. The preferences allow you to choose whether automatic notifications are sent whenever something comes in to any mailbox or just your inbox. Or, you can have alerts fire when an e-mail comes from anyone in your contacts or just Mail's new "VIPs."
Mail includes a few simple notification options which will probably suffice for most users.
However, Mail's rules can now be configured to send alerts, so you can get an alert whenever an e-mail comes from certain senders, has certain attachments, or whatever criteria you can think up. This offers quite a bit of flexibility for power users inclined to dig into the rules system.
(Apps like Reminders and Calendar have no specific notification controls, though both apps are, in a sense, entirely designed around setting notifications.)
If your favorite app doesn't have the control over notifications that you need, your best bet is to plead with the developer. If it's one of Apple's own apps, though... well, you'll need to complain to Apple.
Keep it centralized
Finally, there's Notification Center itself. Its icon now occupies the upper right menubar target once given exclusively to Spotlight. Click on the icon, and Notification Center slides in from the right.
Enlarge / The desktop slides over to the left to reveal Notification Center "hiding" underneath.
You can also use a trackpad gesture to slide the Notification Center into view: slide two fingers from the right of the trackpad and across it. Slide both fingers back off the right side of the trackpad to slide the desktop back over it. The gesture takes a little getting used to, but feels very natural once you get the hang of it.
Watch the video included in the Trackpad preference pane carefully; you have to slide from off the trackpad from right to left.
The Notification Center will post all the recent notifications in a list, sorted by time, for each app (as configured in the Notifications preference pane). One interesting behavior we noticed is that notifications from one of OS X's includes apps automatically clear once that app is brought to the front. Notifications from non-Apple apps must be cleared using a small "x" button in its list header.
One particularly nice feature about Notification Center is that you can temporarily disable all notifications by scrolling down to reveal a "show alerts and banners" switch. Turn it off, and all alerts and banners will be silenced. You can switch it back on manually, or let it automatically resume the next morning. This should keep you from missing potentially important notifications in the event you would otherwise have forgotten to turn them back on. Also while this switch is off, notifications still collect in the Notification Center.
Alerts and banners can be temporarily turned off using this switch hidden at the top of the Notification Center list. Note that the menubar icon is grayed out when the switch is set to "off."
This "don't bug me today" switch can also be activated by option-clicking the Notification Center menubar icon. When banners and alerts are turned off, the icon turns a subtle shade of grey as a visual clue about its on/off status.
Notification Center also includes the ability to send a quick tweet via Twitter. You have to add your Twitter account to the Mail, Contacts, and Calendars preference pane—even if you use the official Twitter app. Once you do, a "Click to Tweet" button appears at the top of Notification Center. Click it, type your message, and hit "Send." It's not particularly faster than using a separate Twitter client in our experience, but the option is there. Later this fall, you'll also be able to send a Facebook status update using a similar interface.
Be sure to set up your Twitter account in System Preferences. This will let you send tweet from Notification Center as well as use system-wide "share" buttons to tweet pictures, URLs, and more.
Tweeting from Notification Center isn't a huge productivity improvement, but the option is there if you need it.
Finally, a "gears" icon at the bottom of Notification Center lets you jump to the Notifications preference pane in System Preferences.
In all, Mountain Lion's system-wide notifications offer a lot of flexibility, though we expect it will become much more useful once more third-party developers find useful ways to support it. Even if you merely use the capabilities baked into Apple's own apps, however, there's plenty to keep you aware of what's happening while you plug away working on some task or other in Photoshop, Word, or other app. And if the notifications become more of a distraction, Notification Center's off switch makes it easy to silence them—at least until the next work day.
If we had any major complaint, it's that Notification Center on both OS X and iOS cry out for a scheduling option. For instance, perhaps I only want notifications about emails coming to my Ars Technica e-mail address to bother me during work hours. Likewise, I'd probably like to shut off most or all notifications after, say, 10pm on most nights. Perhaps Apple can work on that feature for the next version of OS X.
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