
There isn’t a special button you need to push to bring up Notification Center on macOS Big Sur. In the following steps, you’ll learn how to customize the notification experience, so it better matches your needs.

On the other side are widgets for the third-party Parcel, Day One, and Forecast apps. What follows is a look at Apple’s Screen Time widget alongside ones for two third-party apps, Skylight and CleanMyMac X. Third-party widgets are also new in macOS Big Sur. Click on a group to expand and see all of the notifications for that set. And yet, because they are grouped, there’s less space being used. In the following example, there are numerous notifications for news and weather.

Grouped notifications are also useful since they take up less space on your Mac. In the following two examples, you can reply to an email or start a podcast directly from notifications: You can also reply to an email, listen to the latest podcast, and expand a Calendar invitation to see where the event falls in your day. Now, click and hold the notification to take action or get more information. One of the most useful changes is the interactive notifications on Mac for Apple Podcasts, Mail, Calendar, etc.

Further, notifications are now grouped by a thread or app, which you can disable if you want to see them individually. Today widgets have also been redesigned to make them easier to see at a glance. In this case, there’s a single, dedicated column with notifications sorted by most recent. Like the rest of macOS Big Sur, Notification Center’s biggest change focuses on a redesign.
