notifications - PSafe Blog

Which Apps Are Worth Receiving Notifications From?

PSafe Newsroom — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 21:49:08 +0000

For most apps on your phone, turning off the notifications function is a boon to both you and your smartphone’s productivity. Odds are pretty good that, if you had push notifications for every app on your phone, that you’d get nothing done. After all, who would ever need notifications enabled for Photos or a QR Reader? That said, there are some instances when you should have notifications enabled for apps.

Messages and Phone
No one wants to miss an important call from their mother or a text from their best friend, especially if there is an urgent situation that demands an immediate response. Whether or not you receive many calls and text throughout your day, calls and texts to your number are usually from people that you actually care about in your life. It pays to have extra notifications turned on in the event that you miss an important voicemail from your doctor or a conversation with your spouse.

Email
Like with calls and texts, emails can be important and may require an immediate response.

Unlike your calls and texts, however, your email is more susceptible to receiving spam messages that may cause undue distractions and alarm when reaching for your vibrating phone. To prevent this, simply enable notifications only for your primary personal and primary professional email accounts. If you have multiple email accounts for professional use, personal use, or both, enable notifications only for those that you most frequently utilize.

Calendar
Most of us live busy lives that require us to perform many various tasks throughout the course of the week, which means there have probably been moments in your life where you’ve forgotten to buy groceries, fold the laundry, or schedule that dentist appointment. If you rely on your phone’s built-in calendar to keep abreast of meetings, deadlines, errands, and date nights, it pays to have alerts set up to remind you just in case. Plus, it’s a great habit to develop to keep yourself organized and on top of your daily obligations.

Breaking News and Commuting Apps
If something big happens in the world, chances are you’ll find out about it through a plethora of channels — texts from family, Twitter feeds, TVs in the airport set to CNN. That said, if you’d like to keep on top of national and global events without spamming your home screen with Tweets, try allowing some notification permissions from news sources like Reuters or CNN Breaking News.

Additionally, if you rely on public transit to get to and from work, you are probably aware that accidents can and do happen that throw a wrench into your regular commuting plans. For instance, if you commute into New York to work, having both an MTA and NJ Transit/LIRR app can do wonders to keep you from waiting at terminals and subway stops.

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The New “Anti-Harassment” Twitter Features

PSafe Newsroom — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 21:42:27 +0000

Before, it seemed like you had to be a celebrity to get Twitter’s full protection from bothersome users. Finally, twitter is dispersing their anti-harassment technology to the masses. We’ve got the details to make sure you have all the tools to make your feed what you want it to be.

In the past, Twitter has let high-profile users filter their feed, but now Twitter wants to improve the quality of tweets you see. Twitter started letting blue-checked accounts filter this a year ago, but they’ve transformed their platform to make these features more accessible and easy to use.

Notifications Settings
First, Twitter has created a new notifications tab that will allow you to easily control your notifications settings. By clicking on the new notifications tab you will see an a settings option. The symbol for this option looks like a gear. By clicking on that option you will see a button that says “Only people you follow.” By selecting this button you will only see tweets from people you follow on the mobile twitter app and on twitter.com. This way you will only receive notifications from accounts you like and want to hear from.

Quality Filter
Twitter just unraveled their newest filtering option, the Quality Filter control, which they’ve been testing out since last year. This option scans tweets by their origin and the behavior of the account. The filter takes out lower-quality content which includes automated tweets or duplicated tweets. This will not filter out any tweets from accounts you follow or interact with on a daily basis. You can try it out, and if you feel like it’s negatively affecting your twitter experience, just turn it off and your twitter will go back to the way it was before. The San Francisco based company explains that the purpose of this feature is to learn and improve the entire twitter experience, so stay tuned to new changes and upgrades if you believe that the filter could be improved.

These two features will definitely take a step closer in protecting you from users who look to negatively impact your twitterverse. What they can’t do? Protect your android from viruses. Download PSafe Total to make sure you have the a virus protection that rated the highest in AV-Testing. Now your twitter and your phone will be free from hackers, tweet on!

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Save Your Swiped Away Android Notifications!

PSafe Newsroom — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 17:02:48 +0000

As you’re quickly scanning through your phone and getting multiple notifications at the same time, it’s easy to lose notifications you wanted to keep. But never fear — there are several ways to retrieve these lost notifications. If you have an Android 4.3 Jellybean or above, the system gives you a simple way to retrieve your lost notifications. If you have a different Android operating system, don’t fret. You can still recover your abandoned notifications, you’ll just have to download an app. Read on and we’ll explain how to retrieve your notifications both ways.

If You Have Android 4.3 Jellybean or Above

Press and hold a blank section of your home screen. This will bring up your Widgets option.
Tap and hold the widget labelled “Settings shortcut.”
Drag this widget onto your phone’s home screen.
Once you’ve done this, you’ll be asked which settings screen you want to link to. When prompted, choose “Notification log.”
This shortcut, then, will always take you to your list of notifications, with your most recent notifications at the top.

Pushbullet

If you don’t have those versions of Android, install Pushbullet to retrieve your lost notifications. The Pushbullet app makes sure you never miss a notification by collecting all of your notifications and phone calls on your computer. You can also text and receive texts on your computer, reply to messages from a variety of messaging apps, and share links and files between all of your devices.

Desktop Notifications

Like Pushbullet, Desktop Notifications does what its name promises: it gives you notifications from your Android devices on your PC. This app lets you sort by most recent notifications, as well as by individual messaging programs, like Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger. While the app is functional for you, it’s also part of a study that collects anonymous data about how users interact with notifications. To use Desktop Notifications, you also need to install the companion browser extension for Google Chrome.

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Organize Your Android Notifications by Color Coding Them

PSafe Newsroom — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 19:31:45 +0000

Notifications are mundane and bland, designed to be functional rather than beautiful. For users with dozens of apps frequently pushing notifications, this could result in important information getting lost in an endless stream of visually-similar popups. Color coding notifications fixes this problem by making them eye-catching and easier to distinguish at a glance.

Whether you’ve tweaked your device’s basic settings, modded your home launcher and icons, or gone as far as to fully root your phone, you’ve no doubt made use of Android’s abundant customization options.

Luckily, you don’t need to be a tech pro to change the look and feel of your device. Thanks to the hundreds of customization apps available in the Google Play Store, almost every aspect of your Android phone can be modified to fit your personality without needing root access — a process that not only could “brick” or ruin your phone, but void its warranty.

Step 1: Install Notify BETA

Notify BETA, from developer Skytek65, is a free app that turns bland, basic notifications into colorful and dynamic messages that display in the upper portion of your screen. When a notification is received, a bubble, color-coded to correspond with the source, will pop up and expand, displaying the message.

Step 2: Install HeadsOff

If you’re running Android version 5.0 (Lollipop) or above, you will need to install HeadsOff before configuring your Notify preferences. This app disables your phone’s native “heads up” style notification, allowing Notify to replace them with their custom design.

Android version 6.0 (Marshmallow) must manually disable peaking for each individual app by going to Settings, Sound and Notification, App Notifications, and then selecting each app and toggling off “allow peaking.”

You can check your system version by going to your system settings, scrolling down to the bottom, and selecting “about phone.”

Step 3: Set up your Notify preferences

After disabling stock notifications, switching on color-coded notifications is easy. Launch Notify and follow the simple tutorial to grant the app access to your notifications. It’s that simple.

Since the app is currently still in beta, there aren’t any settings yet. Although notifications work with every app, some might not be fully optimized.

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