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In Your Face App Guarantees That You Notice Appointment Alerts

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It’s easy to get caught up in what you’re doing and miss an alert for a Zoom meeting or a reminder to leave for an appointment. The Mac app In Your Face ensures that will never happen again by taking over the entire screen for notifications and requiring that you click a button to dismiss or snooze it. It can also play sounds repeatedly, lets you pick which calendars and reminder lists to use, gives you single-click access to videoconference links in events, and shows ongoing and upcoming events in the menu bar. In Your Face costs $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year, or it’s available in the $9.99 per month Setapp bundle of over 230 Mac apps.

(Featured image by Blue Banana Software)

Social Media: Are you often late to online meetings or in-person appointments because you were too focused on your work to notice the time? The In Your Face app ensures you’ll never miss an important meeting again.

How to Get Custom Alerts for Email from Your VIPs

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Few people get so little email that they want an iPhone notification for every message that rolls in. But many of us have just a couple of people—our personal VIPs—whose messages are important enough to warrant an alert. If that’s true for you, and you want to know right away when your boss or your spouse or your child sends you a message, set up VIP Alerts. In Mail in iOS, in your Mailboxes list, tap the i button next to the VIP mailbox. If necessary, use the Add VIP link to pick your VIPs from your contacts, and then tap VIP Alerts to jump to the screen of Settings > Notifications > Mail > VIP. Once there, you can choose a banner style, alert sound, and other notification-related settings.

(Featured image by Noelle Otto from Pexels)

So What Are All Those Stacks of Notifications in iOS 12?

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It can be easy to become overwhelmed by iOS notifications, particularly if you have chatty friends or apps. In iOS 12, Apple corralled notifications by grouping them into stacks so you no longer see an endless screen of alerts. To expand a stack of notifications on either the Lock screen or in Notification Center (swipe down from the top of the screen), tap the stack. Once you’ve expanded a stack, you can tap Show Less to restack it, tap the X button to remove the entire stack, or tap any individual notification to open it. By default, iOS 12 groups notifications intelligently, which might entail separate stacks for different Messages conversations, for instance. If that’s still too much, you can go to Settings > Notifications > App Name > Notification Grouping and tap By App to collect every notification from the app into the same stack.

Solving the Mystery of Missing Messages Notifications

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A client got in touch recently with a maddening problem. When he received texts on his iPhone, Messages displayed notifications for messages from everyone…except his wife! Needless to say, this was a problem. Since notifications appeared correctly for other people, it wasn’t related to overall settings. It turned out that he—or someone else, or iOS gremlins—had inadvertently enabled the Hide Alerts switch for the Messages conversation with his wife. To fix it, all he had to do was display the conversation in Messages, tap the i button at the upper right, and disable Hide Alerts. (In the Mac version of Messages, click the Details button and look for the Do Not Disturb checkbox.) It’s a good feature designed to let you mute a chatty group conversation, but it can cause stress if applied to the wrong conversation accidentally.