Tag: notifications

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Mobile Syrup

How to change iOS 16’s notification style

iOS 16 has a ton of new features and capabilities, from crazy new lock screen customizations to scheduled emails and more. Along with the lock screen changes, Apple switched up how iOS displays notifications in the Notification Center with a new bottom-up design.

Fortunately, for those who aren’t big on the change, there are some customization options to tweak notifications, although you can’t get the old notification style back. If you head into Settings > Notifications on your iPhone running iOS 16, you’ll see three options for how iOS displays notifications: Count, Stack, or List.

Stack is the new default, which shows your notifications in, well, a stack at the bottom of the display. With this setup, you’ll see one notification with the rest layered underneath it, fading away into the background. Swiping up brings the notifications up into a list that you can scroll through. From there, you can also open notifications, manage them, clear them, and more, just like you would with the old notification view.

iOS 16 notification settings and the Stack option.

Next up, Count. This view collapses all the notifications into a single line of text that tells you how many notifications you have. It sits at the bottom of the screen between the flashlight and camera buttons. This gives you the best view of your lock screen and overall looks the cleanest but gives you the least amount of information. Once again, you can swipe up to view your notifications.

Left: Count notification option. Right: List option.

As an added bonus, if you’re using the other notification options and you want to collapse everything into the Count style, you can swipe down to minimize the notifications.

Finally, the List option is most like the old notification style. This shows a list of notifications that you can expand by swiping up. The list is still bottom-aligned to keep the fancy new lock screen widgets in view, but it’s still as close as you’re going to get to the old iPhone lock screen.

Via: 9to5Mac

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Mobile Syrup

Windows 11 update adds animated widget notifications to the taskbar

Microsoft is rolling out a taskbar update to Windows 11, and no, it doesn’t bring back the ability to move the taskbar to another edge of the screen. Instead, this update adds live animations to taskbar widgets.

As detailed by The Verge, all Windows 11 users will soon see new widget notifications appear over the coming days and weeks as part of an update to the ‘Windows Web Experience Pack,’ a bundle of Windows 11 software that can be updated through the Microsoft Store. The Web Experience Pack powers the widgets feature in Windows 11 and includes the widget animations update.

Microsoft says that the update will now show an “announcement” in the taskbar when something important happens related to a widget. The company describes these announcements as “quick and glanceable,” and notes they’ll go away if users don’t interact with them.

For example, if there’s a weather alert for your area, you might see the weather taskbar widget turn into a storm warning icon. Along with the weather, there will also be alerts for stocks.

Left: Windows 11 weather widget. Right: Weather widget with storm warning. | Image credit: The Verge

The Verge’s Tom Warren says he’s had the widgets on his Windows 11 PC for a few days and describes the new announcements as “rather distracting,” especially the stock alerts. Weather alerts, however, can be useful.

Moreover, Warren says it appears Microsoft doesn’t have an easy way to disable or customize these notifications at the moment. I can see this being a problem for people who find the animations distracting and want to disable them — hopefully, Microsoft adds a way to fine-tune these widgets.

Overall, the widget update is a small change in comparison to the big Windows 11 update expected to come in September. The update is expected to bring folders to the Start menu, drag-and-drop on the taskbar, and more.

Source: Microsoft Via: The Verge

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Mobile Syrup

How to block annoying on-site notifications with Chrome

I hate the web.

This is a tough stance to take since the internet pays my rent, but the way apps and websites constantly vie for my attention is often very draining. That said, I noticed something when I was using Google Chrome today that makes the experience a little bit better.

If you constantly deny popup notifications, Chrome will learn this behaviour over time and auto-block websites asking you to subscribe to its push notifications. I noticed this happening to me today, and when I dove a little deeper, it turns out you can block all those types of notifications directly from the Chrome Settings menu.

 

You should be able to access the setting with this link if you’re in Chrome. If that doesn’t work, accessing this menu is a bit of a pain. Click on the ‘three-dot’ menu in the top left of your Chrome window and choose ‘Settings.’ From there, select ‘Privacy and Security’ from the left-hand menu. Then click on ‘Site Settings,’ and select Notifications from the next page.

Once you’re in the Notifications area, you can disable site notifications or use a quiet way to deliver your online Chrome notifications. There is one issue with this which is that it also silences notifications for important apps like Google Calendar or other online work apps.

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Mobile Syrup

How to use Android 12’s one-handed mode to open your notifications

When Android 12 rolled out, it brought a new ‘one-handed mode’ for Pixel phones. Similar to Apple’s ‘Reachability‘ feature, the one-handed mode adds a gesture that lets users bring the top half of the screen down to the bottom, making it easier to reach.

The feature is convenient on smartphones with big screens since it can be hard to reach items at the top of the screen with one hand — for example, on my Pixel 6, I can reach maybe the bottom-third of the display with my thumb.

While useful, I recently discovered that Google expanded the one-hand mode to include an option to open the notification panel with the same gesture. As far as I can tell, this feature isn’t new — judging by articles I’ve found covering the one-handed mode, it seems Google added it sometime between December 2021 and February 2022 — but it is new to me, and I felt it was worth sharing in case anyone else didn’t know about it.

As useful as the one-handed mode is, it didn’t feel like it solved my core problem. Whenever I needed something at the top of my phone screen, it was almost always a notification. But now that I can use the one-handed mode gesture to open the notification shade, it’s a game-changer.

With the gesture-enabled, you can quickly open the notifications panel by swiping down on the gesture line (or whatever Google actually calls it) at the bottom of the screen.

If you want to make the switch to this method, head to Settings > System >  Gestures > One-handed mode and tap ‘Show notifications.’ You’ll also need to enable the ‘Use one-handed mode’ toggle if it isn’t already. Finally, it’s worth noting that some or all of these settings may look different on non-Pixel Android phones since many manufacturers include their own takes on one-handed modes.