Ryan Collins

🕹ī¸ Do Something Great! 😄

Tag: notifications

  • #tlah Push notifications on the cheap

    Taking control of your notifications is nice, but sometimes you want to be able to customize alerts. For iOS there are apps such as Boxcar, Pushover, and App Notifications. These apps are nice and do the job, but they require a little more setup and/or they cost. As I was working on my iPhone for a replacement, I realized that the built in email app can have different notification types for each email account (such as sound, vibration, etc). So I started to play around, and set up a different Yahoo! account to use for notifications on my phone. My email accounts are set to silent, except for this new Yahoo! account and my VIP list. Now when I want to be notified right away, I use this email account. Under GMail I filter emails from various accounts and forward them to my new email account. As soon as I get them, I get a new notification.

    This convoluted mess could be done with the VIP list feature of iOS, but I wanted to separate my VIPs from other notifications.

  • Take control of your notifications

    Interruptions are deadly. Well, maybe that’s a little bit of exaggeration. But even three second interruptions can cause problems. I’ve decided to take back the notifications on my phone.

    First stop was the phone ringer. Apple doesn’t have a silent ringtone on the iPhone, so I had to search. In my searching I came across the article iPhone tip: Use a Silent Ringtone to Screen Calls in Your Sleep. It not only contained the silent ringtone but also directions on using it. My default ringtone is silence, and a different ringtone is set for those people for which my phone should always right.

    Next up was text alerts. The iPhone has a silent text alert, so that part was easier than the ringtone. Then I also went in and added a tone for just a few people.

    Finally, I went into Settings -> Notifications and turned off the sound notifications for most of my applications.

    Now I have a nice, mostly silent phone which doesn’t interrupt me.