5 Apps With Realtime Notifications About Almost Anything | Dramel Notes

Find out the moment when anything happens. Whether it’s a package showing up at your door or the start of your favorite TV show. Whether it’s a website you love publishing a new story or some site making changes you need to keep up with, there are apps for keeping you up-to-date.

We’ve talked a lot about notifications over the years, from interesting ways to use Google News to stay on top of certain topics to adding basically anything to your Mac’s notification center. Today we’re looking at five apps that let you set up even more notifications, so let’s dive right in.

Hooks (Android): Notifications for Everything

We’ll start with a simple Android app that lets you set up all kinds of notifications. You can set up entertainment items, like when your favorite sports team is playing or your favorite TV show is about to start. You can set up tracking for any package you’re waiting on. You can find out when it’s going to rain, or when any site you love posts a new article. There’s a lot of flexibility.

It’s not the only app that lets you create custom notifications: Pushbullet lets you subscribe to channels for notifications and with IFTTT you can create recipes for anything you want to be regularly notified about. Both of those apps, however, serve some primary function other than notifications and as such take a while to set up. If you want notifications, and only notifications, Hooks is what you’ve been looking for.

Blog Trottr: Get Email Newsletters from Sites That Don’t Offer Them

We’ve shown you how RSS works more than once, and really recommend you use an RSS reader to keep up with your favorite websites. But if you’d rather your favorite websites’ articles come to you, Blog Trottr is a free service that turns any RSS feed into an email newsletter.

Paste in the RSS feed, enter your email address, and choose how often you’d like to get updates. The free plan gives you a lot of flexibility, but if you want to remove ads and customize the look of the emails you need to opt for a paid subscription.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this for sites like ours, with over ten updates a day (subscribe to our newsletter instead). But for sites that update occasionally and irregularly, this could be a great way to make sure you keep up.

Change Detection: Find Out When Any Website Changes

Maybe there’s a site you’d like notifications for that doesn’t offer an RSS feed. In that case, ChangeDetection is a good site to know about. This free service lets you monitor when any static page is changed, and will email you to notify you of changes.

This is a pretty old-school tool: it’s meant to monitor text files. Using it on many modern websites is going to give you problems. But if there’s a basic text page you want to monitor for changes – a terms of service, for example – it’s a good service to know about.

Desktop Notifications for Android (Android, Firefox, Chrome): A Free Pushbullet Alternative

You can set up all sorts of notifications on your phone, many of which aren’t offered on the desktop. Pushbullet, the beloved service for syncing your notifications between platforms for just this reason, has gone freemium. Many users are disappointed with the pricing, and with previously-free features becoming paid. We outlined free alternatives to Pushbullet, but if you’re mostly interested in notifications, this combination of an Android app and browser extension is worth looking into.

I gave this a spin and it worked perfectly — notifications from my phone showed up in Chrome and Firefox without issue. If you want a simple free alternative to Pushbullet, this might be it, just know that advanced features like SMS syncing aren’t offered.

Horntell (Chrome): All of Your Web Notifications in One Place

Lots of sites offer browser notifications, but you need to keep them open in order to see them. Horntell is a Chrome extension, and eventually mobile service, that lets you receive all of your notifications in one place so you can stay on top of them.

Currently it doesn’t support many apps, but if you’re an avid user of tools like Trello and Basecamp it won’t take long to find a use for the service. You’ll need a Facebook account to sign in.

What Other Notifications Services Are Out There?

These are the best notification apps I could find, but I sometimes miss the very best ones. So I want to know what you’ve found. Please fill me in using the comments below – I’m looking forward to the conversation!

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The Best Way to Bypass Upgrade Notifications for Windows 10 | Dramel Notes

On one hand, there are a lot of false claims made against Windows 10. It’s really not that bad. On the other hand, there are legitimate reasons to dislike Windows 10, such as forced system updates and annoying notifications.

Indeed, Windows 10 upgrade notifications are starting to get really aggressive. If you’re still on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, Microsoft seriously wants you to upgrade — so much so that declining these notifications is getting harder and harder.

Consider the latest nag screen, which is frustratingly deceptive. It looks like you have no choice but to upgrade, right? But instead of upgrading now or upgrading later, there’s a tricky third option: clicking the X at the top right!

While that might work for now, it’s possible that Microsoft will make it even harder to decline in the future, so stay wary.

The good news is that hope still remains. If you’re willing to put in a bit of effort, you can effectively block these aggressive upgrade notifications with a combination of changed settings, registry tweaks, and third-party tools.

Are you still on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1? How bad are the nag screens for you? Is this enough to push you towards Linux? Tell us about it in the comments below!

Image Credit: Windows 10 Point by Anton Watman via Shutterstock

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How to Reply to Emails on Your Apple Watch | Dramel Notes

Until watchOS 2, the “Mail” app could only show notifications for and display incoming emails. Now, you can reply to emails messages in Mail using your Apple Watch the same way that you can reply to text messages on your watch.

There are three ways to reply to emails using your Apple Watch. You can choose among several default replies, speak your reply, or reply with an emoji.

When you get a notification on your watch that you received an email (as pictured above), tap on the notification to open the message.

NOTE: Your Apple Watch can’t display the full content if rich-text and other complex media was used in the message. It will only display text. Read the email message on your phone to view the full content.

If you want to reply to the email after you’ve dismissed the notification, or reply to a different email, you can open the Mail app on your watch. To do so, press the digital crown until the Home screen displays. Tap the “Mail” icon.

The emails in your Inbox display. Tap on the email to which you want to reply.

Tap the “Reply” button at the bottom of the email.

You can also force touch the Apple Watch screen while viewing an email message to access actions you can take on the message you’re currently viewing.

Once you’ve tapped “Reply”, a list of default responses display, such as “Let me get back to you”, “Can I call you later”, and “Got it, thanks”. Scroll through the list to see if there’s an appropriate response for the current email. If so, tap on it to insert it into your message.

If you don’t find a response you want to use, you can speak your reply. To do so, tap the microphone button.

Speak your reply to the watch. It types out what you say on the screen, including punctuation marks, like “question mark”, “exclamation point”, “comma”, or “period”. Tap “Done” when you’re finished speaking your reply.

The message you spoke displays in your reply. Tap “Send” to send your reply.

At the top of the screen, a “Sending…” message displays with a progress bar. Once your message is sent, press the digital crown to return to the Home screen and again to return to the clock face.

You can also choose to send an emoji as a reply to an email. Once you’ve opened the email to which you want to reply on your watch and tapped the “Reply” button, tap the emoji button at the bottom of the screen.

Emojis display in several categories, such as “Frequently Used”, “People”, “Activity”, and “Objects & Symbols”.

Swipe or turn the digital crown to scroll through the emojis. When you find one you want to use, tap on it. For example, we’ll reply with a thumbs up emoji.

The emoji you selected displays in your reply. Tap “Send”.

NOTE: If your Apple Watch is connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot, it has enough Internet connectivity to send replies to existing emails, even if the watch is not currently connected to your phone. However, your watch must be connected to your phone through Bluetooth in order to be able to receive new mails.

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Here’s How You Can Set Quiet Hours on Windows | Dramel Notes

Turning off notifications in Windows 10 is a great way to get some peace and quiet, and you can automate a schedule using the Quiet Hours feature.

Click on the notification icon in the system tray to open the integrated notifications panel. Look for Quiet Hours in the panel’s icon grid and click on it to toggle the feature on or off.

When Quiet Hours are active, the grid icon appears highlighted and your PC won’t bother you with notifications. But here’s the catch: on Windows 10, you don’t have control over the time window during which quiet hours function. The feature only works between midnight and 6 AM.

While the Quiet Hours feature comes in handy on any device, the Windows 10 version of it feels like a step in the wrong direction. Windows 8.1 handles this much better: you can configure Quiet Hours to your liking via Settings > Search and apps > Notifications.

Does the Quiet Hours feature sound useful to you? Or do you think the default setting makes it toothless on Windows 10? Tell us in the comments!

Image Credit: Quiet Hours Sign by Robert J. Beyers II via Shutterstock

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How to Turn Safari Website Notifications On or Off | Dramel Notes

If you’re a Mac user and you’ve noticed that Safari sometimes shows you website notifications, you might have wondered how to turn them off, and conversely, on again. It’s very simple and can be accomplished in just a few key presses.

You will see these notifications slide out from the top-right corner like other OS X notifications. They will usually inform you when a website has posted a new article or of breaking news. Usually they disappear within a few seconds but on busy days, you might get one after another.

Push notifications will appear as banners, which slide out from the top-right edge of the screen.

When you click on the Notification Center icon in the upper-right corner of the OS X desktop, you can see a history of these website notifications, just in case you missed any and, of course, you can remove them one by one if you prefer. We talked at length about the Notification Center in an earlier article, so we recommend you read that if you want to know more about it.

If you miss a push notification, you can go back and review in the Notification Center.

The reason you’re even seeing these alerts in the first place is because you likely agreed to allow a website to send you push notifications at one time or another.

If you Allow push notifications, then this is why you see them appear on your desktop.

Luckily, if you don’t want to receive notifications from a particular website (or none at all), you can easily turn them off in Safari’s preferences by either clicking on the Safari menu or using the keyboard combination “Command + ,”.

Once you’ve opened the preferences, click on the “Notifications” tab to see the websites that have asked for permission to display alerts in the Notification Center.

You need to go through and click “Allow” or “Deny” next to each one you want to affect. Alternatively, you can click on a single website and then “Remove” it or you can simply “Remove All” of them in one go.

Safari’s Notifications preferences will give you rudimentary control over website push notifications, though this is the only way to actually remove them.

If you want a website to keep showing you notifications, but you would like to change how it shows them, then click on the “Notifications Preferences…” button in the bottom-right corner of the Safari preferences tab.

This will open the Notifications system preferences, which will allow you to go through and change each website’s notification style, such whether it displays none, as a banner, or as an alert.

The Notification Center will let you tailor how specific website push notifications appear, among other options.

When you go through these notifications, you’ll notice that any and all websites that you see in your Safari notifications can also be found here, in fact, using the Notifications system preferences ensures that you have a lot more control over how each notification acts.

As we said, you can choose whether notifications appear as banners, alerts, or not at all. You can also choose to show them on the lock screen and decide how many recent items appear in the Notification Center.

We hope that you found this article useful, especially if you have been noticing website push notifications and weren’t sure exactly how to deal with them. If you have an questions or comments you would like to contribute, please leave them in our discussion forum.

 

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How to Remap Buttons on Your PS4 for Improved Control | Dramel Notes

Despite some intrusive notifications (that you can turn off) on the system itself, the PS4’s controller is pretty great and well-suited for all kinds of games. Interestingly, Sony added a feature into the console this year that came quietly: button remapping.

Disabled 1 handed gamer. I only play PS4 because a console update allows you to remap buttons to suit you. If Xbox 1 gets this, let me know!

— Packwolf (@Bertholomey) July 17, 2015

Designed as an accessibility feature for those who can’t reach the buttons that they need, anyone can take advantage of this feature to re-assign the control schemes for their favorite games.

To get started, head to the Settings menu of your system, then scroll down to Accessibility. At the bottom, select Button Assignments; you can also check Add to Quick Menu if you’d like to see these options when you long-press the PS button.

Now you need to Enable Custom Button Assignments and Customize Button Assignments once the above is checked. From here you’ll see a grid of buttons that lets you re-assign anything away from its original state, except for the touchpad and PS button.

If your favorite game doesn’t let you change the controls in a way that fits you, you can override them here (e.g. swapping melee and crouch for shooters).

Note that this changes the buttons at the hardware level, so if you change O to R3, your game will still say “Press R3 to crouch” and you’ll have to press O to do so. It takes a bit of getting used to, so it’s probably not a good idea to customize the controls for every game.

Don’t forget that you can upgrade your PS4’s hard drive if it’s getting too full of games!

What games will you remap the buttons for? Will you have a use for this feature? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment!

Image Credit: Alex Ionas via Shutterstock.com

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How to Adjust the Volume On Your Apple Watch | Dramel Notes

While we love how the Apple Watch parks useful notifications right on our wrist, it can be a noisy little cricket. Thankfully it’s easy, if you know where to look, to quiet the Apple Watch.

Adjusting the Volume from Your Watch

There are two ways to deal with a noisy Apple Watch directly from the watch itself. The first way is to blanket silence it, which is the technique we highlighted in our previous Apple Watch tutorial, How to Silence, Manage, and Conceal Notifications on Your Apple Watch.

If you need to quiet your Apple Watch in a hurry or you just want to temporarily silence it while you’re in a meeting, it’s very convenient to do so via the Glances menu system.

From the watch face just swipe up to access the Glances menu and over to select the Status glance. There you can tap the bell icon to immediately silence your watch, as seen below. You cannot, however, adjust the actual volume levels here.

 

The second way is more granular and involves a trip into the Settings menu of the Apple Watch. To get there click the digital crown on the side of the Apple Watch to access the application menu, select the Settings (the gear shaped icon), and then scroll down to the menu entry for “Sound & Haptics”.

There in the Sound & Haptics menu, seen above, you can not only mute the watch just as you did with the Glances shortcut but you can also adjust the volume to a comfortable level.

Adjusting the Volume from Your Phone

If you wish to make the adjustment from your phone you do so easily from the My Watch application. To do so open up the My Watch application on the paired iPhone and then scroll down and select, just like on the Apple Watch, the entry for “Sound & Haptics”.

Within the Sound & Haptics menu you can adjust the volume just as you can on the Apple Watch. The big difference here is that, thanks to the screen sizes, the slider bar on the iPhone is radically bigger and offers a little more of a fine-touch when it comes to selecting exactly the sound level you want.

You can also put the watch in “Silent Mode” from the phone application, perfect for those times where your watch is, say, buried in your luggage and chiming away.

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Have a pressing question about your Apple Watch or other gear? Shoot us an email at ask@howtogeek.com and we’ll do our best to answer it.

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