notification for an email I received.
When you click the notification — if you’re fast enough — it opens the email for you, and puts it in a separate window, ready for you to reply. That’s exactly the kind of response you should expect from your notifications — click them, and they do something appropriate. Some notifications display contextual options. For example, notifications from the Mail app have options for flagging, archiving, or dismissing an email you’ve received.
These notifications can be sent by apps, websites (through the web browser, when you’ve approved the receiving of notifications), and Windows 10 itself. As time goes by, more and more apps will be integrated with Windows 10’s action center.
Working with Notifications
In earlier versions of Windows 10, clicking a notification rarely accomplished anything useful. Due to user feedback, Microsoft has improved the way the action center is organized and displays information. In recent Windows 10 versions, the system is usable and useful.
If you find that a particular program is generating notifications that you don’t want to see, Windows 10 lets you disable all notifications rather easily, or you can pick and choose which apps can send notifications and which just have to stifle their utterances.
Here’s how to disable notifications:
1 Tap or click the Start icon, the Settings icon, and then System.Or you can get into Settings from the bottom of the action center (refer to the All Settings icon near the bottom right of Figure 3-2).
2 On the left, choose Notifications & Actions.You see the Notifications & Actions pane shown in Figure 3-5.FIGURE 3-5: Make changes to how Windows 10 displays notifications.
3 Turn off all notifications by scrolling down and finding the slider marked Get Notifications from Apps and Other Senders and then sliding it to Off.
4 If you would like to silence just one app, scroll down farther (see Figure 3-6), find the app, and move its slider to Off.You’re finished. There’s no Apply or OK button to tap or click. At Step 4, if you click or tap the name of an app instead of moving its slider, you get access to options for controlling how its notifications are displayed. For example, you can disable the sound played for each notification, change the number of notifications visible in the action center for that app, set its priority, and more.
FIGURE 3-6: You can silence notifications from individual apps.
Working with Settings Shortcuts
The action center contains a gob (that’s a technical term) of shortcuts at the bottom of the Notifications pane. In Figure 3-2, I count four of them. If the computer used a Wi-Fi connection, there would have been additional shortcuts for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, rotation lock, battery saver, and brightness. The maximum number of shortcuts available varies depending on whether you're using a desktop PC, laptop, tablet, or 2-in-1; its hardware configuration; and the apps installed.
Quick actions mimic what you would find on a smartphone — airplane mode is an obvious analog — all readily accessible from the right side of the screen. In many cases, a quick action displays a Settings page, where you can change the individual setting, displays a pane on the right side of the screen (Connect, Project), or toggles a specific setting in, uh, Settings. The Screen Snip quick action opens the Snip & Sketch app, which you can use to take screenshots.
You have some — but not much — control over which icons appear at the bottom of the pane. Here’s how to exert as much influence as you can:
1 Tap or click the Start icon, the Settings icon, and then System.Or you can get into Settings from the bottom of the action center.
2 On the left, choose Notifications & Actions, and then on the right click the Edit Your Quick Actions link.The Notifications pane appears (refer to Figure 3-7).FIGURE 3-7: Editing the list of quick actions available in the action center.
3 To rearrange the icons for quick actions, just click and drag.You can’t drag a quick action off the grid.
4 To choose additional quick action icons, click or tap the Add+ button, and make a selection from the list that appears.
5 To remove a quick action icon, click or tap its pin on the top-right.
6 When you've set things the way you want them, tap Done.
Table 3-1 explains what each of the configurable quick action icons does.
TABLE 3-1 Some Quick Action Icon Results in the Action Center
| Click This Icon | And This Happens | |
|---|---|---|
| Tablet Mode | Flips the computer to tablet mode. | |
| Brightness | Adjusts the screen brightness to the level you want. | |
| Connect | Searches for wireless display and audio devices — Miracast in particular. | |
| All Settings | Takes you to the Settings app. | |
| Battery Saver | Cycles between two battery saver modes, dimming the display. It doesn’t work if the machine is plugged in. | |
| VPN | Displays the Settings app’s Network & Internet section on VPN, where you can add a new VPN connection or connect to an existing one. | |
| Bluetooth | Turns Bluetooth on and off. | |
| Rotation Lock | Prevents the screen from rotating from portrait to landscape and vice versa. | |
| Wi-Fi | Turns Wi-Fi on and off. There’s no provision to select a Wi-Fi connection. | |
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