By Graham K. Rogers

With the release of OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion there System Preferences had one or two additions along with the many changes, both visible and under the surface. Notifications is new and introduces to the Mac a similar method of displaying incoming information as may be found on iOS devices.

When it was introduced with the iOS 5 update, the purpose of Notifications was to provide a user with onscreen input of incoming information when the display is off; or without interruption to ongoing tasks. The new Notifications system with OS X will therefore be familiar to users of the iPhone and the iPad, but there are differences because of the nature (and use) of the computer.

Instead of a semi-transparent full-screen display (iPhone) or a large panel (iPad) the notifications panel is a thin screen display to the right of the monitor that slides away when not in use.

Notifications

When first used the apps listed to the left were Apple only items, such as Calendar, FaceTime and Mail. These were in a section marked, "In Notification Center." At the bottom of the list is a further section, "Not in Notification Center."

If any apps listed are deactivated, they move from the top section to this "inactive" area. Items in the list in System Preferences are displayed in the same top to bottom order in the Notifications panel when viewed. Items may be clicked and dragged into the preferred order. Changes are immediate

As apps or services become available for the Notifications Center -- through download or update, for example -- so they are added to the list.

All of the items in the list (except a Twitter Share Button) have settings which offer options as to how the incoming data is displayed. To the top of this options panel is the alert style: None, Banners or Alerts. Text below explains that Banners appear in the upper-right corner and go away automatically. Alerts stay on screen until dismissed. These are similar to Growl notifications.

The banner is thin and contains the basic information. Alerts are broader and have two buttons: Close and Snooze. The system voice also announces the arrival of such notifications.

At the bottom half of the panel are three checkboxes: Show in Notification Center; Badge app icon; and Play sound when receiving notifications.

• Show in Notification Center turns the feature on for the specific app or service highlighted. Alongside is a button with options for the number of recent items displayed: 1, 5, 10 and 20

  
  

  

  
  

• The Badge app icon shows a small icon of the specific app for easy identification

• Play sound when receiving notifications may be useful for certain apps or services, but if there are a lot of incoming messages, this may begin to disturb the user so may be deselected. As with all of the options, it only applies to the specific app highlighted at the time.

At the bottom left of the panel is a button which allows sorting of the Notification Center by time or manually.

Notes

There is no way to add any additional app or service. These appear automatically as an app is released that takes advantage of Notifications. As an example, a 3rd party RSS feed reader that I downloaded -- Monotony -- initially used only Growl. When it was updated to version 1.1 it appeared automatically in the Notifications panel and I was able to fine tune its behaviour using the options available.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.