Q&A: Mountain Lion’s notifications
Mountain Lion helps you stay on top of things, and notifications are its chief tool for doing this. A notification can alert you to impending Calendar events and reminders, as well as new email, Facebook, and Twitter messages. Sometimes the alerts require you to click a button to dismiss them. But other types of alerts appear for just a moment, as small, subtle messages at the top right of your screen, and then disappear.
The Notifications feature is a core part of Mountain Lion. If you’ve been using an iOS device for a while, you’ve seen notifications there: banners that pop up on your lock screen to display alerts for calendar events or to let you know you've received text messages. Still, notifications in OS X involve issues that bear some explanation. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions:
Q: What can notifications notify me about?
A: Any application can use notifications, as long as the app hooks into OS X's notifications feature. For starters, Apple programs such as Mail (), Calendar, Reminders, and Messages can display notifications.
OS X's notifications take their cue from iOS. Here's a basic banner-style notification from Messages.
Many third-party apps use notifications as well. If you’ve added your Twitter and Facebook logins to Mountain Lion’s Mail, Contacts & Calendars preference pane, you can see status updates and tweets. On my Mac, I also see notifications from Panic’s FTP program, Transmit; Red Sweater Software’s blogging tool, MarsEdit (); and Literature and Latte’s writer’s tool, Scrivener (), among others.
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http://www.macworld.com/article/2015473/qanda-mountain-lion-s-notifications.html
