notifications - page 3

If you’ve read these tips for any length of time, you’ll know that there are plenty of settings on your iPhone that were designed first and foremost for people with various disabilities, but that can be extremely useful for those of us who don’t have a specific disability, as well.

Flash-powered alerts are one of these features; for those with hearing impairments, using the iPhone’s flash to let them know when a notification alert has happened is critical, as they may not be able to hear an audible alert, nor the telltale buzz sound the iPhone makes when set on a flat surface.

If you want to use this same notification feature yourself, perhaps when having an audible alert, vibration or otherwise, isn’t viable, here’s what to do.

I’ve always been a fan of Twittelator Neue, a clean Twitter client for iPhone that’s super fast and has a unique way of handling pictures in your timeline. However, I never agreed with its pricing policy. The app costs $4.99 upfront, but users had to pay an extra $1.99 per year on top of that for push notifications.

Fortunately, its creators have had a change of heart. With its latest update, Twittelator Neue provides push notifications for free.

The Pebble smartwatch has been creating a lot of hype lately, and while we’re still waiting to try it out in the Cult of Mac offices, other early reviews have been pretty positive. Apple is rumored to be working on an iWatch, and we’re just starting to get a glimpse of the future of wearable technology with the likes of Pebble.

Pebble is cool because it connects with your iPhone or Android device to display incoming notifications, control music, etc. A new jailbreak tweak takes it one step farther by letting you see all incoming notifications—no matter the app—via Pebble on your wrist.

The official WordPress app for iOS has been updated to introduce a number of new features, including push notifications for “everything happening on your blog.” The company has also improved the way in which you manage comments, allowing you to view, moderate, and edit them from one screen.

Doubtless by now, you’ve seen a few notifications on your Mac when there are software updates to be applied. They’re easy to temporarily get rid of, either by clicking ont he Close button, swiping them to the right, or disabling notifications for the rest of the day. This allows you to update your software when you want to, on your own schedule, with a lot less nagging.

But what if you want to not be bugged at all about a specific software update? With the first solution above, the notification comes back in a little while. If you turn notifications off for the day, they’re back at nagging you tomorrow. If there’s a particular bit of software you’d like to not update, or just are tired of being bugged, here’s how to keep it from re-occuring.

When you create a Calendar event, you have the option to have your Mac notify you of that event before it happens. In the case of an all-day event, however, you don’t have an easy option to change the time of day you’ll get the notification.

It can be done, however, with a little digging into the filesystem and a configuration file, letting you change the time of day you’re notified by default for all-day events.

True, email is boring. However, it’s something we all use everyday to communicate for work, home, and pleasure. In iOS 6, Apple made a few changes to the way the Mail app works, tossing in new ways to sort, sign, and attach things to emails. Using the iOS 6 Mail app effectively takes a little bit of practice, a few tweaks, and the following five tips for using iOS 6 Mail the right way.

I like to be notified when email comes in, but I sure do get a lot of email. Prior to iOS 6, I was relegated to just dealing with it, and setting the type of notification–Badges, Banners, and Sounds–for eMail in general. It got a bit tedious, to say the least, with the four main accounts I check on my iPhone.

You know now that you can set up a different signature for each email account you check on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 6. But did you know you could also set up a different Notification style for each account, as well?

Here’s how.

Back in April, we told you about a nifty way to bring a “Now Playing” message from iTunes to your Dock. Now that Mountain Lion is out, that feature is missing. Luckily, there’s another slick way to get a notification of the track name and info right in Notification Center. Which sort of makes sense, since that’s where notifications go.

Using a third-party app from MediaFire, NowPlaying, you can make this happen on your own Mac running OS X 10.8, more commonly known as Mountain Lion.

Mail will notify you whenever an email comes in via the new Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion. While this seems to be a pretty cool feature, it might get a bit overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of mail coming to one of your accounts, or several email addresses, each with their own high volumes of electronic communications.

It’s fairly easy to control the Notifications preferences for Mail, of course, but here’s the thing. Mountain Lion’s Mail app lets you choose one specific mailbox to receive notifications from. This can be a valuable time and attention saver, especially if you marry it to the power of a Smart Mailbox to filter even further.

Remember that concept we showed earlier this month you for an awesome email app called .Mail? We pleaded with creator Tobias van Schneider to turn his idea it into a reality, and it looks like he listened, because .Mail is coming to your Mac. And you can sign up now to be the first to know when it drops.

Earlier this month, we thought Boxcar had given on third-party push notifications for iOS. But it seems that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the service is about to get a new lease of life after being acquired by Kwaga, the company behind WriteThat.name.

Following nearly six hours of downtime this morning, the Apple Online Store is back up. Although the Cupertino company has not added any new products, it has introduced a new notifications service that provides U.S. customers with text message alerts when their order status is updated.

When you’re getting a little bored of looking at the same old home screen, the DreamBoard app for iOS can completely revamp your device with a whole new look. Couple that with a new tweak called Metroon and you have yourself an iPhone that runs Windows 8 (well… almost) — complete with a Metro user interface, live tiles, and even the “Charms” bar.

Before every iOS app in the App Store began sending you push notifications — whether you want them or not — the best way to stay on top of your alerts was with Boxcar, a free app that delivers push notifications on behalf of a huge catalog of apps. In its App Store description, Boxcar boasts about delivering over 1 billion notifications since its debut in July 2009. But it seems the service may have finally ended.

Facebook has updated its standalone Facebook Messenger app for the iPhone this morning to deliver a nice selection of new features, in addition to some bug fixes and performance improvements. Highlights include in-app notifications, the ability to delete individual messages, and support for larger images.

The iOS 6 beta has been available for four days now, but we’re still stumbling across new features that Apple didn’t mention during WWDC. One of those is the ability to receive government AMBER and emergency alerts automatically on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

As a user with multiple iOS devices, I have hated iOS 5’s handling of notifications across multiple devices with my very bones. Get a notification and read it and clear it on your iPhone? It’ll still be waiting for you on your iPad and your iPod touch. Someone call the Department of Redundancy Department. It’s just irritating.

Luckily, with iOS 6, Apple seems to have figured it all out. Now, as long as it’s an iOS 6 stock app, if you read a notification on one device, it’ll be whisked off your other devices magically, presumably through iCloud. Which is an interesting point in and of itself: will Apple soon be oiffloading all of their Push Notifications to iCloud?

Via: Apple ‘N’ Apps

The new iOS6 Mail app gets a great new feature that isn’t obvious just reading the spec-sheet: Per-person and per-account alerts. Now you can let mail stay silent, and ping you only when a certain person sends you an email.

Despite delivering excellent business solutions in many of its products, there’s always a consistent refrain that Apple doesn’t understand business customers or corporate computing needs. Apple didn’t focus on many specific business uses of the new and upcoming products announced during today’s WWDC keynote. If you look closely, however, there are definite signs that Apple is designing iOS 6 and Mountain Lion,.

Have you ever been making a phone call and had an email notification chime in your ear? Or how bout a banner notification pop up during a game or video? Sometimes you may just want to get away from alerts and incoming messages. Instead of notification after notification endlessly causing vibrations in your pocket, why not tell your iPhone that you’re out for lunch?

It would be nice for Apple to implement a “Do Not Disturb” feature into the iOS Notification Center, but until that day comes, jailbreakers can tell Notification Center to shut up with a couple of handy Cydia tweaks.

As spotted by MacRumors, it looks like iCloud.com might soon get iOS 5 and Mountain Lion style notifications, with Apple currently testing a new notification service on the website.

What do you think? I’m not sure I need yet another place to get notifications, thank you.

Source: MacRumors

We’ve all been there, that moment when the bill for that great mobile plan you signed up for comes in. Monthly access charges, usage charges, surcharges, taxes, governmental surcharges & fees — the list goes on… and on… and on. The FCC and others call this “bill shock,” while I call it well… we’ll save that for another day. Regardless of how we feel about these charges and fees, they are the services we signed up for and agreed to pay. Unfortunately it’s not always easy to monitor our usage and it can be very easy to incur overage charges when it comes to services like data and text messaging.

Sparrow for iPhone is great. And I mean hands-down, why-the-hell-isn’t-Apple’s-mail-app-this-good? kind of way. I like it so much, in fact, that I am even using it pixel-doubled on my iPad.

But there’s just one problem: no push, and no notifications. To enable local notifications, Sparrow would have to store your e-mail login details on its servers, and deal with all the responsibility that that brings.

The first version of Sparrow for iPhone included a clever workaround to let it poll for mail in the background, but Apple crashed its ban-hammer down on this wrongful use of the network event APIs.

But there’s a workaround, using the excellent BoxCar app and some simple setting up of your Gmail account.

While repeated alerts for our text messages are helpful sometimes, other times they’re just downright annoying. If you find that they frustrate you more than they help you, here’s how to turn them off and receive just one alert per message.