Notification Center in Mac OS X sends a little pop-up alert in the corner of the screen when an event occurs. These are often in the form of a reminder originally made on an iPhone, a new inbound iMessage, a persistent software update or twenty, new emails, almost anything really. While obviously useful for many … Read More
Have a bunch of Notifications and Alerts sitting on the lock screen of your iPhone or iPad that you don’t want on there anymore, but don’t want to unlock the device or leave the lock screen? No sweat, rather than swiping to unlock the iOS device and then manually addressing the notifications, you can shuffle … Read More
Swiping down from the very top of your iPhone screen (or iPad), you’ll find Notification Center swoops on down, where alerts, notifications, iMessages, and missed calls appear. There’s also the “Today” tab, which aggregates information from your Calendars, Reminders, Stocks, and destinations, and puts them into an active days summary of what’s on tap for … Read More
Tired of seeing that linen wallpaper in the background of Notification Center of OS X? You can change that linen pattern to something else, giving a nice customized appearance to the Notifications panel when you’re checking alerts on the Mac. There are actually two ways to swap out the Notifications background, the harder manual way … Read More
Notification Center in iOS has both Twitter and Facebook integration and the ability to post to either service with a “Tap to Tweet” and “Tap to Post” button. On the iPad and iPhone these are accessed with the rest of Notifications by using a downward swiping gesture from the top of the screen. If you’d … Read More
The little red badges that appear on app icons stored in the Mac OS X Dock are intended to provide a quick alert and overview of some important notification pertaining to the respective app. Whether it’s the new unread email count, new iMessages, a Calendar event, unfinished Reminders, missed FaceTime calls, or any other number … Read More
As you know, OS X plays a sound when a new Notification pops up in Notification Center. That default sound is called “Basso”, a low toned sound effect that is kind of like a short tap on a low note piano key. CultOfMac hilariously describes the sound as a “frog fart”, and if you aren’t … Read More
Mac OS X no longer includes a native RSS reader in Mail or Safari, something that just about no one is particularly pleased about, but a new free app brings RSS functionality back to OS X in perhaps the most logical new way: by embedding feeds into Notification Center. Aptly named “RSS.app”, it’s a lightweight … Read More
Notification Center in Mac OS X is great but it can act up every once in a while and either stop updating completely, alerts may not comet through, widgets may not load, or the entire thing can freeze up and become inaccessible. If you encounter any such issue with Notifications in OS X, or modifications … Read More
Want to quickly dismiss a desktop notification without opening Notification Center in Mac OS X? It’s easy, just hover over the notification with the cursor and use a two-fingered swipe gesture from left to right, swiping the alert to where Notification Center appears, and the alert will quickly zip away and off your Mac desktop … Read More
The default setting for Notification Center in both Mac OS X and iOS is to sort alerts from apps manually, a setting which doesn’t make much sense if you use Notifications as a timeline of events and want the most recent always on top. Fortunately, changing Notification Center to arrange alerts by time is as … Read More
Hot Corners are a great feature of Mac OS X that let you instantly enable things like the screen saver, sleep, the lock screen, LaunchPad, Dashboard, Mission Control, and new with Mountain Lion, Notification Center. The advantage to using Hot Corners are their speediness, since you only have to swipe the mouse cursor into a … Read More
Previous versions of Mac OS X allowed you to see a “Now Playing” notification pop up over the iTunes Dock icon, the alert showed the song and artist name anytime a track switched and is a really popular tweak. It turns out that hidden feature is missing from OS X Mountain Lion, but with the … Read More
Looking for some temporary peace and quiet from alerts and notifications but don’t want to completely disable Notification Center on your Mac? There are two quick ways to temporarily hush all notifications in Mac OS X, silencing and stopping both the pop-up alerts and sound effects with the notifications, these two methods last until the … Read More
Notification Center is a great addition to Mac OS X but not everyone likes it, sometimes just muting the alert sounds and turning banners and alert pop-ups off per-app is just not enough, and you may want to disable the entire notification system completely. Furthermore, if you don’t use Notifications on the Mac then you … Read More
Want to open Notification Center with a keystroke on the Mac? It can be done by setting up a custom keyboard shortcut. Typically Notification Center of Mac OS X can be summoned either with a click of the menu bar item in the upper right corner, or a two-fingered swipe left on a trackpad, but … Read More
Using an excellent third party tool called terminal-notifier, you can post alerts and messages to Notification Center directly from the command line. This has a myriad of potentially valid uses, but one fantastic use-case is along the same veins of verbally announcing when a command has completed or sending a badge alert, but instead posting … Read More
Notification Center is a great addition to Mac OS X, but the alert sounds coming in with each banner notification from a million and one different Mac apps and updates can be pretty annoying fairly quickly, particularly if you have a lot going on. Rather than muting all system audio to hush the constant chiming, … Read More
