One of the biggest new features in iOS 7 is the new Notification Center. Instead of a single view when you drag it down from the top, it now includes three different views, “Today”, “All” and “Missed”, which you can switch to using the tabs at the top. You can also access Notification Center from the lock screen and even interact with notifications directly from the lock screen.
The new Notification Center is quite different from previous iOS versions, so it may come as a bit of a shock initially for many users updating to iOS 7. However, you can customize it to suit your needs, and even disable most of the new Notification Center features if you like the simple functionality of the old one.
Customizing Notification Center
To access Notification Center settings and options, open the Settings app and go to . From there, you have a plethora of toggle switches you can take advantage of to customize the Notification Center to your liking. Starting from the top, you can disable access to Notification Center from the lock screen by disabling , or both.
Below that are the settings for the Today View. Here you can show exactly what you want to show in the Today View, including a summary of the current day, a calendar view of how your day looks, reminders, stocks, and a summary of tomorrow.
As for the Notifications View, it’s pretty similar to the old Notification Center where you can choose which apps are shown in the Notification Center and manually sort them or prioritize them by when the notifications arrive. The first “” and “” on this page is a list of apps that will appear in Notification Center if any of these apps receive notifications.
Tapping one of these apps will only give you options for that app. You can choose what kind of alert you want to receive. A “” is when you move the notification towards the top of the screen and it will disappear after a few seconds. A “” is a pop-up notification that you need to take action on; these are better for those who definitely don’t want to miss a notification.
“” is the little red dot with a number in the upper-right corner of an app icon, letting you know that there’s a notification for that app that needs action. If you want to disable a particular app from appearing in Notification Center, return to the main “Notification Center” window and click on the “” option in the upper right corner. Three horizontal lines will appear next to each item. Tapping and holding this will allow you to drag items into the “Include” and “Do Not Include” sections. If you want them to be sorted manually, you can also drag around the items to sort them.
Getting Back the Old Notification Center
The new Notification Center is very different and some users may really miss the old look. While you won’t be able to get the full look of the old Notification Center back, you can at least make it look the same as before. To accomplish this, simply turn off “”, “”, and “” on the main Notification Center settings page. This will bring Notification Center back to its core features.
However, you will not be able to get the old Weather widget back. Instead, the “Today View” provides a text-based version of the weather, but it’s not that good. Hopefully we’ll be able to put a Weather widget there once iOS 7 is jailbroken.
