How To Configure Notification Center In iOS 5

You’ve got iOS 5 and you’re excited to start using the awesome new Notifications Center that keeps all your alerts in a handy little pull-down panel at the top of the screen. To get it working exactly how you want you’re going to need to do a little work. Here’s how to configure Notification Center to your exact preferences.

To get set up, watch the video above or just follow these steps:

1. Open up the Settings app on your iPhone’s home screen.
2. Tap the tab labelled Notifications.
3. First tap the Weather or Stocks widget. These each have one option only: on or off. On will display the widget in the notifications panel and off will — surprise! — not.
4. Go back to the Notifications settings page and tap one of the listed apps. These are the settings you’ll see for the majority of apps. This is where you select what kind of notifications you want that app to provide. If you choose None it won’t notify you at all. If you choose Banner it will show a little unobtrusive banner at the top of the screen and store the notification in the notifications panel. If you choose Alert, the app will use the old style of alerts and show a popup message every time the app wants to get your attention. Choose the one you want for this particular app.
5. Up at the top you’ll see an option to turn Notification Center on or off for this particular app. If you turn it on, alerts will show up in the notifications panel. If you choose no, they won’t. Below that option you can set how many alerts you want to show up in notifications. The default is five, but you can choose anywhere between one and 10.
6. Towards the bottom you can decide if you want to show these alerts on the lock screen. This is really handy for message previews, but not particularly private.
7. Once you’ve finished a single app, you’ll need to go through all of your apps to set them up the same way. This can be tedious, but you’ll find that iOS does a pretty good job of guessing what you’ll want and you should get through it all quickly.

That’s it! Notifications Center is pretty easy to use so you should get the hang of it quickly. Want to learn how to set up other neat wireless features in iOS 5? Check out our other how-to guides.