Getting to know the iPad The Notification Centre
A notification is an alert messages to let you know you have an email or an app has been
updated.
They're much more powerful on the new ipad.
Like most things on the iPad, you configure notifications within the
Settings screen, so let's go to Settings, tap Notifications and you see three main sections:
1.
Sort Apps; 2.
In Notification Centre and 3.
Not in Notification Centre.
The first, Sort Apps, offers two options, Manually and By Time.
These control how items are displayed in the Notification Centre.
To access the notification Centre, tap on the time in the iPad's taskbar and swipe down.
The pane that sweeps down is the Notification Centre, an area where you can see notifications
that you've received.
Not only can you see them, but you can also act on them.
Just tap one and the app associated with the notification will launch, taking you to the
item that triggered the notification; a calendar event or a reminder, for example.
So in this case, let's tap on Meeting.
The Calendars app opens and it shows us that event.
Go back to the Home screen and swipe down once more to see the Notifications Centre.
To remove a group of notifications, just tap the small X to the side of the category header,
and tap Clear.
I’ll tap on one of my notifications - Instacast, tap the X , then Clear, and that entire entry
disappears.
To make the entire Notification Centre disappear just tap on the Home screen or swipe up from
the bottom of the pane.
Back to Notification settings.
As I was saying, you can choose to sort the order notifications appear either
manually, or by the time that they were received.
To change the order that apps appear in Notification Centre when sorting manually, just tap Edit
in the top right corner, and then drag the drag handle next to the app.
When you next view the notification Centre pane, all notifications will appear in the
order that you specified.
When you choose to Sort By Time, the most recent notifications appear at the top of
Notification Centre, so let's go back to By Time.
You can configure how notifications are offered by tapping on each app within the In Notification
Centre area.
So tap an app and you find options for switching on and off notifications altogether with that
app.
So, for example, tap on Calendars.
I can switch it on and off \altogether and I can also choose the number of items that
I'm going to show.
By default, you'll see five items, but you also have the option to see just one item,
10 items or 20 items.
In the Alert Style area you can choose what alerts look like when they are received.
If you don't want alerts to appear at all when received, select None.
If you'd like to see a banner which appears for a short time at the top of the iPad screen,
tap Banners, and if you'd like to view an alert that you must confirm, choose Alerts.
Move back to Notifications.
In this case let's choose Messages.
Here we have four options.
1.
Badge App Icon is for causing a round red icon with a number inside to appear in the
top right corner of an apps icon, indicating the number of notifications received by that
app.
You may see a sound option appear for some apps.
For example, a game might make a sound when it's your move, or a Twitter client might
chirp, if you receive a tweet that's addressed to your username.
Most of the time, I turn this option off, as there's nothing more distracting than an
audio alert going off in the middle of the night when you have fallen asleep with your
iPad next to you.
2.
In some cases, such as in messages, you have the option to Show Preview.
If I receive an iMessage, it will pop-up and show me a little snippet of that message,
and at that point I can choose to answer or not.
3.
Messages also has a Repeat Alert option.
This is set by default at once, but tap that option, and it shows you that you can have
never, twice, three times, five times, or ten times.
This is particularly useful for messages, because sometimes we miss a message when it
comes in, and having it repeat every so often is a good idea so that we notice that it's
happened.
4.
View In Lock Screen is for exactly that.
This instructs that app's alerts to appear on the iPad screen when you awaken it, but
before you've unlocked it by swiping the slide to unlock switch.
Back into the Notification screen.
At the bottom of the screen is a list of all the apps capable of receiving notifications
that don't currently have notifications switched on.
To enable notifications for one of these apps, just tap the app, and configure the options
we’ve just examined.
Back to the Home screen and see what a notification looks like.
Here is an iMessage.
There it is, we see the banner alert and we see a badge up in the right corner of Messages.
Respond to it just by tapping on Messages, View it, and now when you go back to the Home
screen, you'll see that the badge disappears, because I've looked at the message.
Now let's take a look at an iMessage in Notification Centre.
Here comes another message.
Look at it in Notification Centre by swiping down, there it is,
and to reply to it I can simply tap on it in Notification Centre.
Back to the Home screen, and now I'm going to lock the iPad to show you how it looks
on the locked screen.
Another message has come in.
To reply to it, we don't have to slide to unlock the screen, all we have to do is slide
on the notification itself, and here it is.
So that’s notifications.
Consider yourself notified.
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