Mac Notifications are great when you need them and terrible when you don’t. This is how you temporarily deactivate all notifications and configure which apps and websites they can otherwise be displayed for.
Temporarily disable all mac notifications with Do Not Disturb
The Do Not Disturb feature prevents you from seeing notifications or answering calls while it is active. To activate it, open the Notification Center by clicking the icon in the top left and then scrolling up to see two hidden options.
Toggle the Do Not Disturb switch and you won’t see any notifications until tomorrow morning. That was easy, but what if you want to do it automatically most days? You can do this by putting Do Not Disturb on a schedule.
Go to System Settings> Notifications.
The first thing you see is the Do Not Disturb settings. Select the “From” option and set the times when “Do Not Disturb” should be active. The standard times activate the “Do not disturb” function overnight. However, you can set any period.
You can set Do Not Disturb to turn on when your display is sleeping or when you are mirroring on external screens such as TVs or projectors. You can set your Mac to allow phone calls (or repeat calls over a three-minute period) while the Do Not Disturb feature is on. This way you only disable notifications.
Disable banner notifications for each app
You may not want to turn offall macnotifications, but only those from a specific app. You can do that too!
Go to System Settings> Notifications, but this time pay attention to the left field. Any application that uses notifications is listed here.
Find and select the application for which you want to turn off notifications. Now you can configure how notifications are to be carried out in the right-hand pane. Let’s break it down, let’s look at the alarm style first.
The default notification style for most apps is “banner”. These notifications appear at the top right of the screen and disappear after a few seconds. Meanwhile, alarms stay on until you do something to them. Set the option to “None” and no notifications will be shown for this app.
But there is more! There are four check boxes under these options:
The first time notifications from this app appear when the screen is locked. Deactivating this option can be helpful for security reasons. The second option decides whether the notifications are displayed in the notification center. We showed you how to access it earlier. Leave this option selected so that you can check notifications for apps in the notification center even if you have turned off notifications for this app.
The third option – “Badge app icon”: This option allows you to disable the red dots that appear on the dock icons. And with the fourth option, you can turn off the notification sounds.
In this way, you can adapt each application to your needs. Therefore, turn off notifications for any application you prefer not to see.
Disable Safari website notifications
If you’re a Safari user, you’ve probably noticed that some websites ask you if they can display notifications. Maybe you even accidentally approved a couple just to regret it. No problem: Open Safari and click on Safari> Settings in the menu bar. Go to the “Websites” tab and click on “Notifications” in the left pane.
Here you can deactivate the notifications for a specific website. You can also prevent websites from asking this question by unchecking the “Allow websites to ask permission to send push notifications” checkbox.