Notification & Notification Center
iOS users will immediately recognize
Mountain Lion’s new notification system – it’s more or less the same one that
debuted on iOS 5 last year. The idea is certainly the same: Lots of things
happen on your Mac – email, IMs, alarms, even Twitter updates. Notification
Center gathers them in a single location, so you can see everything at a
glance.
The center
Like its iOS counterpart, OS X’s
notification system actually has two parts. The first is Notification Center
itself, a repository of all the notifications you’ve receive. To activate it,
simply click the notifications icon in the top right corner of the menu bar, or
swipe with two fingers from the right edge of your trackpad toward the middle.
This works even when you’re in a full-screen app. To hide Notification Center
again, reverse your swipe, or click the menu-bar icon a second time. If you’re
more of a keyboard person, you can configure a key combination to toggle
Notification Center in Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Mission Control.
Clicking a notification in Notification
Center launches the app associated with that alert and, when possible, takes
you to the data the email message, calendar event, and so on – that triggered
it. Unread notifications are marked with a blue dot, which disappears when you
click that alert. You can mark all notifications for a given app as read by
clicking the X icon in the top right corner. You can’t clear individual
messages and some apps such as Calendar have notifications you can’t dismiss.
Of course, you aren’t always looking at
Notification Center. The second part of Mountain Lion’s notifications are
alerts and banners, which the system triggers when an application wants to pass
some information along to you.
Notification
preferences: The new Notifications preference pane lets you specify which apps
send alerts and how they do so.
Although alerts and banners both appear as
small boxes in the top right corner of your screen, they differ in one way:
Left alone, banners disappear a few seconds after they arrive. Alerts, on the
other hand, require manual dismissal. Most alerts also have a Snooze button,
which suspends the alert for another 15 minutes, while some have other options.
The Mac App Store, for example, prompts you when updates for apps or even for
OS X itself are available, giving you the option to view the details of those
updates or click Update to install them right away.
Clicking a notification in
Notification Center launces the app associated with that alert.
As you wish
You can choose to have Notification Center
sort your notifications two ways: manually or chronologically.
If you want to sort them manually, you drag
apps and services in the left column of the Notifications preference pane into
whatever order you desire. If you choose to organize them by time instead, you
select that option from the pop-up menu at the bottom of the preference pane.
Once you do so, notifications appear with the most recent ones at the top.
In this pane, you can opt to see 1, 5, 10
or 20 of the most recent items for each app; you can also specify whether the
app should issue banners or alerts (or no notifications at all), whether an
icon should appear with a badge that indicates unread messages, and whether a
sound should play.
Some entries in that list on the left have
additional options. For example, if you’ve entered your Twitter account in the
Mail, Contacts & Calendar pane, you can choose to be notified about
mentions, direct messages, both, or neither. And you can enable and disable the
Sharing Widget, which lets you send posts from Twitter (and, later this year,
from Facebook) from within Notification Center.
Some apps take a number of notifications
settings into their own hands. Mail, for example, lets you specify (in the
General pane of its Preferences menu) which kinds of messages should trigger
alerts: new messages in your inbox, messages from contacts or VIPs, or messages
in specific mailboxes. Other apps don’t offer that much granularity. Calendar,
for instance, lets you turn off shared calendar messages and/or invitations,
but doesn’t allow you to restrict notifications by calendar.
Safari can pass along notifications from
specific websites. How those notifications appear is dictated by Safari’s
configuration in the Notifications preference pane. Within Safari’s own
Preferences, however, you can allow or deny notifications site by site. Only a
few sites, such as Gmail and Facebook, support this now, but that number will
likely increase.
Safari
alerts: Some apps have their own notifications preference. Safari, for example,
lets you specify which sites can issue alerts.
When you switch the slider to off,
alerts and banners are suppressed until you reactivate it.
Turn them off
If you don’t want an app to appear in
Notification Center, you could just uncheck all the boxes and set the alert
style to None. But it’s easier to click the entry in the Notification pane’s
left column, and then drag it to the Not In Notification Center section; that
way you won’t see any notifications whatsoever from that app.
On some occasions you want to silence all
your alerts temporarily when you’re watching a movie on your computer, for
example. To do so, scroll to the bottom of the Notification Center pane; until
you see the Show Alerts and Banners are suppressed until you reactivate it or
until the following day. (The latter condition is a safety measure, lest you
miss notifications you want to see). Mountain Lion even automatically disables
alerts and banners when you’re presenting in Keynote, or if your display is
mirrored to an external monitor.
While Apple has updated its own apps to
work with Notifications, third-party developers will have to update their
programs to cooperate with the system and Apple only grants Mac App Store apps
full access to the features.
Fortunately, the developers of Growl which
itself has now transmuted into a Mac App Store app have already pledged
compatibility with Notification Center, so some support should be available for
those non- App Store apps left by the wayside.
iCloud
When Apple introduced
iCloud at the 2011 Worldwide Developers
Conference, the company touted the online service’s ability to seamlessly sync
your contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, images, documents, and other data,
along with a free mail account, remote access to other iCloud-enabled
computers, and a locator for tracking down lost portable devices.
iCloud
Tabs: Click the little cloud icon in Safari’s toolbar, and you’ll see a list of
the browser tabs that you have open on other devices.
While iOS 5 took early and extensive advantage
of iCloud on both the iPhone and iPad, OS X Lion did less with it: You could
sync your mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, and notes, and send images to
your iPhoto library via Photo Stream, but you couldn’t use iCloud with your
documents or program settings.
With Mountain Lion, however, Apple has
added new features to Cloud and integrated those sorely missing from its
desktop OS.
