3.7 Work with Notifications

     As you use your MacBook Air, you receive e-mail, reminders about appointments and tasks, information updates, and so on. Each application you use can send notifications to keep you informed about what is happening. There are two types of individual notifications. When Alert notifications appear on the screen, you have to take some action to clear them, such as clicking the Dismiss button. Banner notifications are more informational; they appear briefly on the screen and then go away automatically. You can view and work with groups of notifications in the Notification Center.

     You can choose which applications can send notifications to you and which types of notifications each can send. To configure notifications, you use the Notifications pane in the System Preferences application. Here, you can set your Do Not Disturb period and choose who — if anyone — can interrupt it. As well as banners and alerts, OS X provides badge notifications and sound notifications. Badges are numbers that appear on an application’s icon to show how many new items the application has. Sound notifications are sounds an application plays when events occur.