How To Get the Most From the Notification Center

The Notification Center appears on the right side of your Mac's screen and contains lots of useful information. To get the most from it, you should take the time to customize both the Today view and Notifications view. Eliminating notifications you don't care about and learning how to use the Today view widgets will help you get more from this useful macOS feature.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to use the Notifications Center on your Mac. 
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So the Notifications Center is a very useful tool for all Mac users. To get the most out of it take the time to learn about what it can do. The most obvious way to bring up Notifications Center is to click on the Notifications Center icon which is always at the top right corner of your screen. But there are three other ways to do it which I'll show you in a little bit. I'm going to click there and there are two sections to Notifications Center. Today and Notifications. The only way to switch between the two of them is to click on one of two buttons here at the top. Today view shows you information in a variety of little windows called widgets. You can use your trackpad or mouse to scroll through all these widgets here to see all the information. 
At the top you get today's day and date. You get a little summary of the weather and some information about calendar events for that day. Then these widgets here are all customizable. The way to customize them is to click the Edit button at the bottom. That moves the Today view over to the left and then you see some items on the right that you haven't yet added to it. You've got minus buttons here to remove items and plus buttons here to add them. So, for instance, if I don't want to see Stocks here I can click and it goes away and moves over there and I can add it back by hitting the plus button. But if I do want to see, say, the Calculator widget I can click that and it will move over. I can use these three lines here on the right to drag these to change the order. So I can move Calculator around.
Notice the Today widget is not movable. It will always appear as the first item. Likewise there's also a Tomorrow widget which will always appear as the last item. Now these widgets here are either here by default such as Now Playing, Stocks, or World Clock. But there are also ones added by different apps. So you can see I have two apps, Twitter and Parallel, that have added widgets to Notification Center. You usually get those by installing those apps. You can find other apps that have widgets by going to the App Store. There's a button here at the bottom of the screen. Click that and it will take you to the App Store and show you a list of apps that have Notification Center widgets in them. So you can see if any of your favorite apps have them or if any of these look useful to you.
To change settings for one of these widgets you don't do it in Edit mode. Edit mode is simply for adding, removing, and organizing the widgets. So click Done to get out of that and then go into regular View mode. As you move the cursor over the widget you'll see an i button to the right here. So for instance if I wanted to customize the weather widget I can click that and you can see here I can remove cities from it or add a new city's zip code as a location for the weather app. Then I click Done when I'm finished. Likewise if I would go and add, say, the World Clock app it would appear here. I would hit Done. Then I would hit the i button in World Clock and I can add a new location and then I'll get that clock there as well.
Now the second part of Notification Center is the Notification side. Click on that and you're going to see a list of notifications. When a notification appears on your screen it may appear for a few seconds and disappear or may appear and allow you to Dismiss it. But it can go, depending upon how you have the app set, to this list here. So you'll see a list of notifications. So if you've missed one you can go to the Notification Center to see what it was. Click on it and it will go to that app and show you that item.
Now to customize what you see here you're going to want to go to System Preferences. A quick way to get to System Preferences right to Notifications is to click this little icon here at the bottom right corner of Notification Center. You click that and it opens up System Preferences. You're right in Notifications. Now you can go through all the different apps that will give you notifications and change how they display their notifications. For instance if I look at Calendar I can change things like the Alert style for it. Now this doesn't change anything in Notification Center. The Notification Center control is right here. This checkbox, Show in Notification Center. So if there's an app that you don't want to put notifications in the Notification Center, like for instance we saw over here that I got an iMovie notification. I don't necessarily need to see that and have that in the list. So I can go and look for iMovie and I can say Don't Show that in Notification Center. Now when I go over here you'll see that iMovie notifications don't appear in the list.
Now you also have a control here for how things are ordered in Notification Center. I can sort it by Recents, Recents but group them by App, or Manually by App. So we had it as Recents before. But if I do Recents by App you can see now it puts them all in groups. So there's Mail and there are the two Reminders notifications grouped together. If I do Manually by App then the order is going to be different because it's going to be determined by what's here in System Preferences. So you can click and drag these items in System Preferences to reorder them. So for instance if I wanted Calendar to be on top but then Reminders to be directly after it and then Messages after that I can put them in that order.
I know it can be frustrating to look at the Notifications Center and see a ton of stuff listed here. It kind of makes the entire thing useless if there's too much stuff. So it's worth the time to go through the different apps here in System Preferences. Turn off Show in Notification Center for the ones that you just don't need to see in this list. By turning a lot of those off the ones that remain will become much more useful.
Now if you want a good quick way of checking your email without launching the Mail app just move Mail here to the top and then Notifications Center becomes the way to check your email. You can just click on a message if you need to go to it and it will open up that message. You can respond to it, Archive it, etc. 
Now another thing that's in Notification Center in both the  Today and Notifications View is a set of two controls. If I swipe down using my mouse or trackpad I can see I can turn Night Shift on or off here. I can also turn on or off Do Not Disturb. It's great to have an easy way to turn on Do Not Disturb if you're about to give a presentation, for instance, you may want to turn this on so you don't get notifications  appearing on the screen. You could also hold the Option key down and click on the Notification Center icon and it will turn on or off Do Not Disturb. You can see the icon here gets grayed out when I have it turned off so I can know that it's off.
Now there are three other ways to bring up Notification Center besides clicking on this button here. One is to use a gesture on your trackpad. Most Mac users have a trackpad. If you use two fingers on the trackpad and you swipe from the right side of the trackpad over slightly it will bring it up. I find this works best if you put your index finger on the trackpad and then your middle finger just off the trackpad and swipe over to the left slightly. This will bring it up. Then you can put both fingers all the over on the right side of the trackpad and swipe off to remove Notification Center. The setting for this is in System Preferences under Trackpad and look for More Gestures. Then there's Notification Center. So if It's not working make sure you have it turned On. This is also a good way to see a demonstration of the gesture.
Another way to bring up Notification Center is to set a keyboard shortcut. So go to System Preferences and under Keyboard and then Shortcuts go to Mission Control. Make sure you've checked Show Notification Center. By default it's off. Then set a keyboard shortcut. So I simply set it to F1 here. Now if I press F1 Notification Center appears. Press F1 again and it will go away. 
A third way to bring it up is to use a Hot Corner. So if you go to Mission Control. Click on Hot Corners. There you can set a hot corner, like for instance say the bottom left, to Notification Center. Now when I drag my cursor to the bottom left hand corner of the left most screen Notification Center appears. Dragging it there a second time will make it disappear. 
Here are a few other tricks. In the Today view you can actually interact with some items. So for instance in Reminders here if I wanted to check something off I can click it there and it will actually complete that reminder. I don't have to go to the Reminders app. If I type something in the Calculator app, like a calculation 2+2=, if I do command C then it copies the result. Then I can go into another app here and Command V to paste. In the Weather widget if I click on one of the weather items here it will take me to Weather.com for the full forecast. The Now Playing app, if you add it, will show you the song that's currently playing in the Music App and you have a set of controls so you can Pause or move the music around. Even Skip to the next track. The Stocks app here, if you click on a stock, will open up the Stocks app and take you to the page for that stock. 
So to make the Notification Center useful for you take the time to customize which notifications show up there and then also customize the widgets in the Today view and learn how to use the ones that you keep.

Comments: 12 Responses to “How To Get the Most From the Notification Center”

Diego Tozzi

4 years ago

Ciao GHERY SEI UN GRANDE, TI SEGUO DA POCO E STO IMPARANDO TANTO NEI TUOI VIDEO.OGNI TUA PRESENTAZIONE C'E SEMPRE QUALCOSA DI NUOVO. IO HO SOLO UN PROBLEMA CHE NEL SEGUIRTI PER CAPIRE I TUOI TUTORIAL HO UN PO DI DIFFICOLTÀ DATO CHE NON HO UN INGLESE COSI FLORIDO E QUINDI DEVO RIVEDERLI PIU' VOLTE. CIAO

joe juliano

Im on 10.14.6 Mojave and this doesn't to work for me. I want to add mail to the notifications center but the drag and arrange do not work as you show it in the vid.
I am not ready for the jump to Catalina, so this must be for Catalina.
Thank you for your tutorials

Ian Leckie

Thanks for this, Gary, I learned a few things I didn't know! One problem...in the weather widget, when I click on a city, Safari opens but I don't get directed to the Weather Channel. Instead I get a blank page with "Oops! We are having trouble finding your page. Please try again..." No Weather Channel! Is there a way of setting the correct URL? If I manually enter weather.com the site works fine. I'm running 10.14.6 on an iMac. Thanks!

Bruce Peck

How do I adjust Notification Center preferences so that every time I turn on the computer, Do Not Disturb is set to off? Right now I have to turn it off daily. Thank you!

Gary Rosenzweig

Bruce: Go into System Preferences, Notifications and set the time for DND to something like from 12:01 pm to 12:00 pm. Then it will pretty much always be on, except when you manually switch it off.

Ian: Not sure why that would be. Perhaps the site changed since the release of Mojave and Catalina has the right URL. Otherwise, there's not much you can do about it.

Barb

I don't have an edit button.

Terry T

I was getting notifications from websites in addition to Apps. To turn these off/on I had to go to Safari preferences -->Websites --> notifications and then Allow/Deny. I also get the same results as Ian posted related to weather. I found that clicking on the time above the city name will open the list vs. the city name which opens a URL in error.

Hi again Gary: I tried what you suggested, and it did not work. Each morning when I turn on my 2018 MacBook Air, the Notification Center is greyed out. I have to go into System Preferences and turn off the Do Not Disturb button. What do I do so that the Notification Center is on every time I turn on the computer? Thank you!

Bruce: I'm confused by your last reply. You said "Each morning when I turn on my 2018 MacBook Air, the Notification Center is greyed out." That means Do Not Disturb is ON. In your last sentence that is what you say you want.

I want Do Not Disturb to be off each time I turn the computer on. Right now, I am having to turn it off manually with the button. I also am a bit confused!! Sorry

Bruce: That's how it works by default. But now that you have played with the scheduling... what time do you normally get to your computer in the morning? Let's say it is 9 a.m. Then just schedule it to turn ON at some point before that (5 p.m., 10 p.m., 1 a.m., whenever you want). Then turn OFF before you use it, like 7 a.m. or 8:55 a.m.
Another note: Are you actually shutting down your Mac every night? You should let it sleep, not shut it off. See https://macmost.com/a-beginners-guide-to-whether-to-shut-down-or-sleep-your-mac.html

Comments Closed.

How To Get the Most From the Notification Center

Comments: 12 Responses to “How To Get the Most From the Notification Center”

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