![]() A bland notification possibly won't get through Focus Assist, so they publish it as a critical "alert" as well. I suspect some everyday apps are cheating too. Yet every now and again while I am speaking to remote students and trying to demonstrate something, my shared screen will be interrupted with such urgent and vital pop-up messages as "Virus file definitions updated" or "You have enabled a microphone." ![]() When I am running online remote training courses, I have Focus Assist set to Alarms Only in the vain hope that I won't be interrupted by non-essential alerts. "So what if the user wants to hide notifications? Our alerts are just too important!" They consider themselves above the hoi polloi of software development and permit themselves to run roughshod over user preferences. Who decides what is important and what isn't? Even when I switch to Alarms Only, I find that some software publishers take a very loose interpretation of what constitutes an "alarm." The worst offenders are the OSes themselves, of course, along with antivirus and anti-malware utilities which take a haughty attitude towards what messages the user should see. ![]() The best you can do is choose between Priority Only and Alarms Only: that is, notifications will always get through as long they are deemed important enough. You can't stop them completely you can only slow them down. But if you expect Focus Assist to shut all those notifications up, you will be disappointed. On Windows, you have something called Focus Assist, which has an icon of a crescent moon to suggest that it will send notifications to sleep. And there seems to be no way of switching it all off. Notifications have changed from being a targeted line of app-to-user communication into a free-for-all of trivial one-sided chatter. Where once you might have expected to be alerted, say, when a new update became available, the concept of notifications was quickly reinvented as a relentless channel through which software publishers could berate users with whatever messages they fancied: invitations to install trial versions of the software company’s other products, increasingly hysterical requests for you to give them a five-star review on the App Store, stating-the-bleeding-obvious how-to advice masquerading as "secret tips" written by company’s (air)head of Fun, and so on. This changed with the advent of mobile devices. ![]() They’d tell you when messages arrive, for example, or announce that a background task had completed, or warn you that a drive was running short of space. In the early days of software notifications, they would fulfil useful functions. I just wish they would learn their place. Don’t get me wrong: alarms and notifications have their role. Barely a quarter of an hour goes by without one or other alerting me to something irrelevant or unimportant. If you ever want to rob a betting shop, do it on a stormy night. Fish mentality: If The Rock told you to eat flies, would you buy my NFT?.Who would code a self-destruct feature into their own web browser? Oh, hello, Apple.Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?.That is, rather than alerting you to the presence of a thief, they provide anyone within a radius of 2km an extremely loud and thoroughly unnecessary update on the prevailing weather conditions. Take burglar alarms, car alarms and shop alarms for example: they all go off by themselves when it’s sunny or a bit windy. In my experience, even when you know what a boisterous alert is trying to tell you, it is rarely important and practically never wanted. It doesn’t matter what the annoying beep indicates.
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