

I cannot even begin to count the number of times I’ve been away from my Mac, heard an audible alert and then returned to the Mac to be unable to figure out where it came from. But there is just one more thing I want – and I want it rather a lot …

So you might think that with all these different options at our disposal, there isn’t anything more that we could want. And we can tell the Mac whether or not to add a badge to the app icon, for example to show how many unread emails we have. We can decide whether or not we want their alerts to show up in the Notification Center. We can choose whether or not apps play sounds. System Preferences allows us to choose on an app-by-app basis whether we want alerts that stay on the screen until dismissed, banners that display for a few seconds and then auto-dismiss, or no alerts at all. MacOS is very flexible when it comes to alerts.
