Notifications

Not wanting to connect my telephone to my main line accounts, I have been using Google's Drive product to move snaps between my telephone and my laptop, which is a minor chore but which works well enough. Suffering, incidentally, from some of the occasional delays that one gets with Microsoft's OneDrive product: you are at the mercy of their cloud servers, which are sometimes busy or perhaps even down.

Now my telephone from Samsung looks something liked that snapped above, with the various Google apps grouped into a single icon, top right in the snap. Drive icon in small, middle right. And for some time that icon had been decorated with a little orange spot, top right, containing the numeral '1' (or sometimes '2'), which I interpreted as meaning that there was one notification for me from Google. Tap the icon and it expands into its constituent parts, with the orange spot now attached to the Drive icon.

But where were the notifications? How could I look at them and clear them? For some reason I found the unresolved spots rather irritating. It was, of course, possible that they were trying to tell me something important.

So I crashed around trying to find the notifications. Drive did not seem to contain any such facility. Unlike 'Settings', which did. I could track orange spots there down. I tried Google. I tried Bing. All to no avail. Some advice about how to control the production of Google notifications, but nothing on how to inspect them. I even thought of trying Bard, but thought that this sort of thing was probably nots its bag.

Then yesterday, quite by chance, I discovered the offending notification in among the trash you get when you swipe down at the top of the home screen. Notifications from Samsung about nothing much at all and notifications about the weather. Notifications which I can inspect and clear. Or perhaps just clear without bothering to inspect. Problem solved.

If only I could find a proper manual which explained the basics in an intelligible way! But I am not holding my breathe: my belief is that writing decent manual is expensive, keeping them up to date is expensive and generally ties product manufacturers down too much. Their products would have to do what the manual says, in the way that the manual says. I suspect Microsoft of not producing proper user manuals for this very reason.

PS 1: it took me a while to find a suitable image of a phone, including the Google group. Reference 2 from Samsung was warm, but reference 1 was much better. Perhaps I will use them next time I am in the market for a telephone.

PS 2: a little later: with this success under my belt, it was time to deal with the NYT which has taken to sending me a ridiculous number of emails. This may have  proved an easier nut to crack: I went into account settings and turned off anything email or notification flavoured that I could find. Not that many of them, so no big deal - not like the wealth of settings in gmail at all. We will see whether these emails stop coming.

References

Reference 1: https://www.phonearena.com/. 'At PhoneArena, we believe in the power of technology to deliver a better tomorrow. We live for the adventure of discovering innovations, dissecting what matters, finding hidden gems, and most importantly - revealing the truth for our readers'.

Reference 2: https://www.samsung.com/nz/support/mobile-devices/how-to-create-a-group-contact/.