Up close with Mountain Lion: Notifications
iOS users will immediately recognize Mountain Lion’s new notification systemit’s more or less the same one that debuted on iOS 5 last year. Long time Mac users, on the other hand, will probably recognize its functionality as the same sort offered by the open-source framework Growl. In either case, the idea is simple: Lots of things happen on your Macemails, IMs, alarms, even Twitter updates. Notification Center gathers them in a single location, so you can quickly see at a glance everything you need to know.
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 received. To activate Notification Center, simply click on the notifications icon in the top right corner of the menu bar, or swipe with two fingers from the right edge of your trackpad towards the middle. This works at any time, 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 shortcut person, you can configure a key combination to toggle Notification Center in Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Mission Control.
Clicking on any notification in Notification Center will launch the appropriate app and, when possible, take you to the datathe email message, calendar event, and so onthat triggered it. Unread notifications appear with a blue dot next to them, which disappears when you click on them. You can also mark all notifications for a single app read by clicking the X in the top right corner. Note that you can’t clear individual messages, and that some appssuch as Calendarhave notifications that you can’t dismiss.
Alerts and banners
Of course, you’re not always looking at Notification Center, hidden away as it is. The second part of Mountain Lion’s notifications are alerts and banners, which are triggered when an application wants to pass some information along to you. While both alerts and banners take the form of small boxes that appear in the top right corner of your screen, they differ in one way: Left alone, banners will disappear a few seconds after they arrive; alerts, on the other hand, must be manually dismissed. Most alerts also have a Snooze buttons, which suspends the alert for another 15 minutes, while some have other options. The Mac App Store, for example, will prompt you when updates for appsor even OS Xare available, giving you the option to view the details of those updates or click to Update the apps right there.
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