CustomNC For Mac

CustomNC is a free, handy and open-source Mac OS X application that enables you to customize the banners and alerts from the Notification Center, which was added to Mac OS X since the launch of Mountain Lion.

The application was created because the system settings for personalizing the Notification Center banners and alerts are too scarce. Moreover, there is no way to change the duration that a banner stays on your screen.

Using CustomNC requires SIMBL or EasySIMBL installed on your Mac. If you install the latter, just select the “Use SIMBL” option from the top left corner to activate the app and allow for CustomNC to function. CustomNC then installs a SIMBL plugin that can do what you configure in CustomNC.

The application enables you to hide the app icon from the banners, change the entry and exit animation styles (Drop or Fade and Slide, Fade or Raise, respectively) as well as the entry and exit animation durations (from 0.1 to 2 seconds).

A nice advantage is that you can set the intervals with decimal precision using simple sliders. What’s more, you can also adjust the duration that the banners stay on screen: from 0.1 to 10 approximate seconds.

Other options include commanding the app to always pulsate the icon (for Mountain Lion users only) and to display the app’s icon instead of Growl (if you have Growl installed). CustomNC displays test alerts whenever you apply new changes.

To sum up, CustomNC is a practical, lightweight and totally free app for making several changes to the Notification Center. The utility works just as described, is simple to install (though it requires SIMBL / EasySIMBL) and much simpler to operate.