14 DAY TRIAL // Among the numerous issues incurred by early adopters of OS X Yosemite, one of the most annoying has to be Notification Center’s amnesia. No matter what settings you tweak in there, the OS forgets it all on reboot.
When you perform a fresh install or an upgrade to any OS X that has Notification Center built in, a queue gets populated with all of the notification-centric apps residing on the system’s hard drive. This queue is found in the Notifications panel in the OS X System Preferences.
There, you can specify what type of alerts you want to receive for a particular app, where you want these alerts to be displayed and for how long, how you want them to catch your eye or ear, etc. It’s a pretty useful thing, but not when it fails to work as advertised. Such as in OS X Yosemite.
Notification Center has amnesia
It’s something I discovered early in my testing. I didn’t want to blame the OS before digging around the settings to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. But I had a strong suspicion something was rotten in the state of Denmark. After more testing, I can now confirm that Yosemite’s Notification Center isn’t sticking to its end of the deal.
As the screenshot above shows, I like Vienna (RSS feed app) and Adium (messaging client) to sit quietly in the queue of tranquility. Messages come and go by the minute, and so do articles on the web. Which means I don’t need these two apps to pop out notification banners once every 60 seconds.
Problem is they won’t listen. Each time I untick “Show in Notification Center” for these particular apps, the setting gets forgotten once I reboot the Mac. In other words, I have to do this every morning when I come into the office. Needless to point out, it’s a drag.
OS X 10.10.1 on the way
Apple has so far failed to acknowledge this problem, but the first incremental update being prepared for widespread release is focused on addressing bugs in Notification Center. According to the seed notes accompanying the build of OS X 10.10.1 handed to developers this week, Notification Center is one of three key areas in the OS that need thorough testing before OS X 10.10.1 can be released to the masses.
Undoubtedly, testers will take note of the issue (especially those who happen to stumble on this article) and the problem will most likely be addressed with but a few code adjustments over at Apple in Cupertino, California.