Notifications of changes to shared Notes?

TidBITS Talk
1

Sharing Notes with other people can be useful. While all changes sync, there doesn’t seem to be a notification that changes were made by another collaborator. Is there a way of getting notified when that happens?

doug

2

Hmm. I get notifications when my wife updates a Note we share. I assume you have notifications permitted for Notes (System Preferences > Notifications > Notes)?

3

We have one shared Note and also get notifications. BUT they can be flakey in that I will sometimes pickup my phone and get the notification hours after he made a change. It’s like opening my phone activated it.

Diane

4

This was all helpful. First, yes, Notifications for Notes is on by default on both of our devices.

I had my sister make a change. I got notifications on my Mac, iPhone, and Apple Watch. However, I did not get notifications on my iPad.

Then I tried making a change but my sister didn’t get a notification on her iPhone or iPad.

So… it seems all over the place.

By the by, how do I delete a random pencil sketch I added to the note?

Thanks.

5

I figured out how to delete the pencil sketches.

So it’s just flaky notifications that are the problem.

When should a notification occur? When the user taps done? But there is no “done” on the Mac.

6

It syncs through the cloud pretty quickly though. I’d expect the notification to happen then.

Diane

7

Yes, syncing through iCloud is pretty much instantaneous. And I can actually see the changes right away. But the notifications just don’t seem to work well.

I asked my sister to check with Apple support. I guess I can too regarding my lack of iPad notifications, but to tell the truth, response is usually better here in TidBits.

8

Is it that they’ve not chosen to set them as Time Sensitive?

Or should a regular notification still appear immediately if a focus mode is not enabled?

9

Yeah, clearly Notifications seem to be running on a different channel than sync. And it makes sense, right? I mean, you wouldn’t want to get a notification every time your sister types a letter in the shared note, but you can see the changes she makes in near real time because they’re syncing so quickly. I’m guessing here’s some mystery formula Notes is using to determine when to broadcast a change notification, likely based on idle time since the note was last changed by the sending user. But that likely doesn’t explain the seemingly random behavior you’re seeing.

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10

I might contact Apple Support about this. Notes seems like it would be useful for some family collaboration on some notes. Apple Support is sort of flaky these last few years though.

11

I just finished a screen sharing with Apple Support. As a workaround for this, if you type an @ then collaborator names pop up and you can tap one of them and they will get a notification.

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12

Maybe it won’t notify you if you have the note open at the time? (Or is that not the case where you/your sister aren’t receiving notifications?)

13

We intentionally closed the apps to check. That wasn’t the issue. I also tested with another friend. The same. Except for that one time I got a notice after my sister did an edit, neither of us ever received another notice again until we started using the @ trick.

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