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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

For me the issue is notifications that appear, then disappear, and I can’t find them again, or what they refer to. If it’s important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.

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This happens to me a lot. Somehow I miss the initial notification but catch it as it animates away and I don't know how to find out what it was or what app caused it.

> I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.

Yeah, same here.

I'm probably missing context (skimmed comments quickly on phone after a long day), but just in case it helps: on iOS, swipe straight down from the very top to access Notification Center. IME, on iOS, it's a reliable way to access them.

Thanks --- I did know about that. For whatever reason, though, that doesn't appear to reliably bring back all notifications, only some of them. While I definitely could be wrong, I'm just about 100% certain that I've had notifications come and go that aren't to be found in the Notification Center afterward.

In the notifications settings/preferences, on a per-app basis, you can set whether notifications are displayed to allow banners, badges, and sounds. And you can turn on/off whether the notification posts to the lock screen, or stay in the notification center (swipe down on iOS, click the clock in the menu bar on OSX)

I'll have to look into this, but my experience has been that Notification Center: doesn't display everything; loses things on a whim; gives no way of recovering things, or displaying all things.

It definitely does. One reliable way I've noticed for this to happen is if you have the app that caused the notification open on another device. Presumably that app is then saying to the notifications system "don't worry, I've got this", but then that notification disappears on all devices.

The notification history feature does exist, on Android (11 I'm using). It can show you both the recently dismissed notifications and the ones in the last 24 hours, grouping by apps.

> important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc.

In light of a grandchild comment to this one about notification center on iPhone, I'll offer that on Mac you can do a two-finger swipe from the right side of the touch pad to get notification center. It doesn't have search, but they are grouped in stacks chronologically. There is no default hotkey, but you can set one in system settings.

> on Mac you can do a two-finger swipe from the right side of the touch pad to get notification center.

Or click the clock.

Which kind of goes back to the earlier point:

> I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense.

There used to be an actual icon for it to the right of the clock. Why would someone think to click on the clock to access their notifications? This apparently also led to the clock becoming mandatory instead of being able to hide it if you wanted to use different options.

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