Dear Notifications Center,

I hate you.

I hate you because you’re that obnoxious person at the party who has to be the center of attention, even though you’re ostensibly on the sidelines.

Whenever there’s an update, not only do I have the badge on the App Store telling me that you would like attention, but I’ve also got you sitting there in my upper left corner of my desktop telling me that no, really, you’d like some attention now.  And my options are either “upgrade” or “details”.  There’s no “dismiss”, there’s no little green X.  There’s just those two options.  I can’t get rid of you without opening up the App Store, even though I’ve already decided that updating you isn’t in my top priorities right now.  In fact, on my home server, you’re always going to have a little red badge on the App Store because that server is still running iTunes 10, and if there’s anything that I hate more than you, it’s iTunes 11.  You’re a close second, though, and if I consider your iOS brother, I might actually hate you more because you’re even more obnoxious in the smaller form factor.

Oh, and I hate you because I can’t tell you that there are notifications that I never want.  I never want to be notified with sound, and you don’t even give me the option to not have sound on some notifications (I’m looking at you, Facebook notifications).  I don’t want banners, and I don’t want alerts.  There’s a reason that I never install Growl on my own, and that I uninstall it if some other bloody application decides to install it without asking me.  The only notification that I ever want is a little badge, preferably with a number in it, and maybe a bounce on the dock icon if something is truly desperate for attention.  Other than that: GTFO.

I hate you because your sort order is impossible to scan if there’s a lot of items in there.  My options are to sort manually (because I totally want to have to manage a list of apps manually) or to sort by time (because I totally care about whether I last managed an app 3 months ago or 3 months and 1 day ago).  Why can’t sorting alphabetically even be an option?

I hate you because you take up a precious spot on my menu bar, and you’ve also broken all of my muscle memory that told me that Spotlight was always the rightmost item in my menu bar.  Now Spotlight, that’s something that I use all the bloody time.  I don’t have a single application or anything else in Notification Center (go on, go look at my settings for you: everything’s listed under “not in Notification Center”), but there you are, not just sitting in my menu bar all the time, but sitting somewhere where I’d love to have something that was actually useful to me.

I want to be able to make sure that any new app never gives me a sound or thinks that it is somehow worthy of alerts or (grrr) banners.  But no, I can’t do that.  I have to manage every single individual app by itself, and I either have to remember to do that when I install the app, or wait until the app fires an unwanted notification, get annoyed by the unwanted and unnecessary notification, and then go through and do the same damn thing again where I remove all badges, alerts, sounds, and everything else.

In short, feel free to FOAD.

No love,
Nadyne.