Removing Annoying Alerts By Setting Notification Alert Styles

Many apps will give you alerts that appear in the upper right corner of your Mac screen. You can set whether these alerts need you to click on them to dismiss, or they dismiss themselves automatically, or they don't appear at all. The settings for this are in System Preferences, under Notifications.


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So one of the things that I hear annoys people a lot is when they get these little alerts at the top right corner of the screen. These can come from just about any app that sends notifications. For instance, I have iTunes playing in the background and the song is about to end. When it does the next song is going to appear there as a little alert. There it is. So a song has ended and a new song begins. This is kind of useful. You might want to see the name of the song that just started playing. Or you may not want to be bothered by that. You may just want that to go away and you have complete control of that because all apps, when they send these kind of notifications, they have to go through the operating system and they have to basically obey your settings for notifications. So here you can see there's that alert that just came up. Let's look at where you set this.

You go to System Preferences and in System Preferences you've got Notifications. Go in there and you see a list of apps. So any app that's going to use this notification system and put those alerts up there is going to be listed here. So I can go to iTunes and I can see my settings here. You can see that there are three main settings. None, Banners, and Alerts.

So None means it's turned off and this may be what you want. For instance in iTunes if you don't want to see these songs announced you can go to None. Banners means that these things will appear in the upper right hand corner but they'll go away by themselves. Now, of course, this still means they might get in the way of work that you're doing and you may not want them to appear. But Alerts, if you go to that, that actually will bring them up and they will stay there. They'll actually be a button to Dismiss it or a button to Show It. In other words it'll bring that app forward. So in the case of iTunes, iTunes would come forward and give the Show button.

So you can choose whether you want Banners, Alerts, or None. If you want to turn it off for an app then you can set it to None. So if I set it to None for iTunes I'll no longer have those song alerts.

Here's a little app I've installed that gives me sample text. I've got it here in the Menu Bar. If I select something there I'm going to get one of those alerts. That's kind of annoying because it's just telling me something that I just did. So I can get rid of that. I'll select None and now when I go and I choose you can see nothing appears there. So it's very useful to go through and figure out which alerts you want to show and which alerts you don't.

Now this doesn't control what types of alerts show. If an app has several different types of notifications then it should have its own settings or it may not. It may not give you any options for that. Or an app may not show you an alert when you want there to be one. So if there's, say, an app that does something and you think well I want it to show an alert that does this, if it doesn't give you that option then there's nothing you can do to add it.

Likewise a lot of apps, like iTunes, is going to show those alerts only when the app is invisible. So you see it just appeared there again and I still don't have iTunes visible. But if iTunes was actually the front most app and it was running I would not see those alerts. It wouldn't show them to me. That's something, again, that is determined by the app itself. But at least if an app is annoying you with alerts or you just don't think they're necessary you can switch over to None or maybe it's giving you by default ones that need to be manually dismissed you can switch to Banners so that they will be automatically dismissed. It's all up to you for how you want to setup those alerts.

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