Notification Center

SmartBanners lets you customize your iOS banner notifications

Anthony Bouchard ∙ March 11, 2016

Your notification banners are an intimate part of your iOS experience that you use to interact with apps and people on a daily basis. With that being said, wouldn't it be nice if you could customize some of their features a little bit?

A new free jailbreak tweak called SmartBanners is now available in Cydia's BigBoss repository free of cost, and will give users a myriad of configuration options to customize the look and behavior of their notification banners. In this piece, we'll take you through a bit of how the tweak works.

EasyClear: the only 3D Touch notification clearing tweak you’ll ever need

Anthony Bouchard ∙ February 27, 2016

Those rocking a jailbreak that have been looking for the perfect all-in-one 3D Touch notification-clearing tweak for their iOS device(s) need not look any further than a new jailbreak tweak release called EasyClear, which is now available in Cydia's BigBoss repository for $1.49.

This tweak makes use of the 3D Touch display on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus to let you dismiss notifications universally throughout iOS. Whether it be a badge on an app icon from the Home screen, or one or more notifications from Notification Center.

5 Notification Center widgets I use every day

Anthony Bouchard ∙ January 25, 2016

When it comes to my own personal iPhone, many of the apps I use on a daily basis have Notification Center widgets that provide information to and even have shortcuts to different actions right from inside of Notification Center.

Apple originally introduced the ability for third-party app developers to create Notification Center widgets with iOS 8, so long as they follow strict guidelines, but that doesn't keep them from being useful.

In this roundup, I'll share my five favorite Notification Center widgets that I use on a daily basis and why I like them.

Tip: send app crash reports to your Mac’s Notification Center

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 2, 2019

I don't know about you, but I'm annoyed every time an app crashes on my Mac and the macOS Crash Reporter interrupts my work with a pop up warning in the middle of the screen. Wouldn't it be great if those crash reports were displayed as banner notifications?

As explained by LifeHacker, a simple Terminal command will override the default system behavior and send those app crash reports straight to the macOS Notification Center, so they don't interrupt your workflow.

In this tutorial you will learn about a Terminal command which will route crash reports through your Mac's Notification Center rather than display them windowed in the middle of your screen.

How to keep your iPhone from knowing where you are going next

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated January 16, 2018

Your iPhone is equipped with a feature called Frequent Locations, which slowly tracks your location in the background to keep you updated via the Today View and the Lock screen on how long it would take you to get to your favorite places based on how often you visit them.

If you choose to enable Location Services during the initial iPhone setup, this feature will be enabled by default, so if you feel like it is a slight hindrance on your ability to remain private, you just might be right. In this tutorial, we'll show you how you can disable the feature and keep your iPhone from knowing where you are going next.

Agenda Widget+ is a highly customizable calendar widget for Notification Center

Sébastien Page ∙ January 14, 2016

Agenda: Widget+ is an application whose sole purpose is to display a list of your future calendar events in Notification Center. The app itself, which actually acts as the preferences panel for the widget, offers multiple options to fine-tune the data displayed in Notification Center.

Feeday offers a quick peek at Instagram from Notification Center

Lory Gil ∙ Updated January 28, 2019

One of my favorite social networking sites right now is Instagram. I love looking at pictures more than reading about how someone feels about the weather today. Pictures really can be worth a thousand words and can make you feel more connected to friends than a sentence.

Feeday is a third-party widget that puts the last couple of posts from your Instagram feed right in Notification Center so you can get a quick view of your feed without having to open the app. Check out our app review of Feeday below.

This tweak gives iOS notifications a makeover

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated February 2, 2016

iOS' notification system it set up so when you miss notifications, they'll stack up on the Lock screen and in Notification Center until you have a moment to look back at all of them.

The notifications are separated with padding and are plain Jane, but for those that want to switch things up a bit and make notifications look a bit more modern or appealing, a new jailbreak tweak called RedesignedNotifications will let you personalize the look of your Lock screen and Notification Center notifications to your own personal preference.

NCCards: customize Notification Center notifications

Jeff Benjamin ∙ November 29, 2015

NCCards is a recently released jailbreak tweak that ushers in a new interface for the notifications shown in Notification Center. The $2.99 tweak, now available on the BigBoss repo, brings new visual cues to notifications, but retains much of the functionality that iOS users are familiar with.

Testing out NCCards reveals a promising feature-set with a few notable miscues. Watch our video walkthrough to see the tweak in action.

Why are some Apple Watch notifications round and others are square?

Christian Zibreg ∙ November 10, 2015

I was wondering about this for a long time, too. Some notifications that hit my Apple Watch are presented using a round app icon while the others embed a square one. But why is that?

Thanks to Mac Kung Fu, we now know that this simple yet subtle difference serves a very good purpose because you can decide whether the notification can be replied to or not by its attached app icon.

How to sort iOS notifications

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 14, 2017

iOS has always grouped alerts in the Notification Center in the order they were received. If you're overwhelmed with numerous notifications from apps and services on a daily basis, this can quickly clutter your view and push important notifications out of the view.

It is possible to change grouping of push alerts to have them compartmentalized according to their respective originating app and listed in the order you define.

In this tutorial, we'll detail how you can select, manage and adjust app grouping within the Notification Center on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

iOS 9.1 enables quick-replying from notifications in WhatsApp for iPhone

Christian Zibreg ∙ October 22, 2015

At long last, iOS is allowing app makers to implement text replies in notifications, a feature Apple used to reserve exclusively for its Messages app.

Twitter was the first App Store app to gain this great time-saver of a feature. On iOS 9.1, WhatsApp for iPhone now supports a handy text field for quickly replying to incoming messages without leaving the app you're currently using.

This feature requires an iPhone with iOS 9.1 or later.