How to Manage Notifications in Mac?

Knowledge is wealth is an old proverb, nowadays getting and playing around the information is all about. Apple with its smart devices like iPhone and MacBook help to get information immediately when available. MacBook has a notification center to instantly alert you whenever you get an email, a pending task reminder or a software update. In this article let us explore how to manage notifications in Mac.

Related: 5 Ways to hide message notifications in iPhone.

Notification Center

The top menu bar of your MacBook has an icon on the right corner showing three small lines. Click on that to open notification center. It has two tabs – Today and Notifications. By default the notifications tab will open when you click on the icon and shows all the recent alerts from various apps. The notifications are sorted with the latest on top showing today’s alerts and then the previous days.

Click on the ‘Today’ tab to view all events and weather details of today along with other widgets. In earlier macOS versions, widgets are part of Dashboard app but later Apple moved the widgets to notification center. We believe Dashboard will get obsolete soon to avoid the same widgets are available on two different places on your Mac.

Related: How to disable notifications in Windows 10.

Open and Close Notifications

You can simply click on any of the notifications to open the app and check the details. In order to close the notification, hover over it and click on the close button. You can also click on the close button against today or any particular day to delete all notifications for that day or period.

Type of Notifications

There are three types of notifications on the Mac.

Banners

Banners are for informational purposes like showing the update completed of an app. Banner notifications will show briefly and will disappear automatically. You can click on the notification center icon and view the banner notifications. Clicking on the banner will open the app that triggered the notifications.

Alerts

Alerts are meant for notifying you where some action is to be taken. The alert notification will generally have two buttons – action button and dismiss button. Alert notification will not disappear like banners and you should click one of the buttons to either take action or dismiss. Below is how an alert notification from Reminders app appears on the Mac.

1. Click on the alert notification to open the application that triggered the notifications.
2. Click ‘Complete’ button to mark the reminder as completed.
3. Choose ‘Later’ and pick one of the reminder options from the dropdown.

Some alerts like emails will have indication for read and unread. The unread alerts will show with the blue dot next to them while read alerts will have a gray dot.

None

This type of notification will not show any banner or alert but will produce a badge and sound.

You can change the type of notification for each app under preferences section.

Night Shift and Do Not Disturb

Notification center by default will show the notifications from apps. But you can do many other things quickly. For example, you can toggle the night shift and do not disturb mode.

• Open notification center.
• Swipe up to see two additional options.
• Night shift will lighten the display colors to make your eyes cool.
• Do not disturb will disable all notifications till the mid-night and resume next day automatically.

Delete or Add Widgets to Notification Center

You can add many widgets on the notification center and quickly get the info what you needed. Click on the notification center icon and go to ‘Today’ tab. You can see ‘Edit’ button on the bottom, click on it to see options like below.

1. Click on the minus icon on the widget to remove it from notification center.
2. Similarly, click on plus icon to add any available widget.
3. If you want to get additional widgets, click on ‘App Store’ and install the widget from App Store.

4. Click on the ‘Settings’ icon to go to preferences.

Related: Disable push notification in Google Chrome.

Customizing Notification Center

You can click on the ‘Settings’ icon shown on the bottom right corner of the notification center to navigate to preferences section. Alternatively go to “Apple menu > System Preferences… > Notifications”. You can customize the following options for each app installed on your Mac.

• Choose the notification style as none, banner or alert.
• Show or hide notifications on lock screen.
• Display preview always or when locked.
• Enable or disable to show the messages from that app in notification center.
• Show or hide badge on the app.
• Enable or disable playing sound when notification arrives from that app.

In addition to the above customizations, you have two more options:

• Setup options for ‘Do Not Disturb’.
• Change the sorting order of the notifications in the notification center.

You can temporarily disable all notifications using do not disturb mode till the end of the day or disable notification for the specific app under preferences.