Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [36]
Below the blue box for setting up your phone is the “Receive notifications” section, which includes a bunch of checkboxes in two columns: Email and Phone (if you’ve activated SMS notifications as explained above, or have installed the Google+ mobile app). You can turn on the appropriate checkbox to tell Google+ how you want to be notified when someone mentions you in a post, adds you to a circle, tags you in a photo, and so on. Controlling Which Notifications You Receive explains each of these notification settings in detail.
Smartphone Notifications
If you carry around an iPhone, iPod Touch, or any kind of Android phone, you can get updates about what’s happening on Google+ contacts right on your device, the same way you’d get a notification about a new email, text message, or whatever.
NOTE
The Google+ app works just the same on an iPod Touch as on an iPhone—except that you can’t connect to Google+ when you don’t have WiFi connection. So wherever this chapter refers to iPhones, the same instructions and tips apply to an iPod Touch.
Android
Once you’ve installed the Google+ app on your Android phone (see Chapter 8), Google+ notifications show up in the notification tray at the very top of your screen (the tray is either gray or black, depending on your version of Android). On an Android tablet, Google+ notifications show up in the lower-right corner of the screen. As with any other Android notification, you can pull down the top tray with your finger to see more details about what Google+ is notifying you about.
You also see your notifications at the top-right corner of the Google+ app itself. As with the Google toolbar, they appear as a number inside a red square (or 0 inside a gray square, if you don’t have any new ones). Tapping or dragging up on this bar displays the same screen you see if you tap the notification in your Android device’s topmost notification tray.
The screen that appears is similar to your Notifications stream and notifications panel. It includes a list of recent happenings, an icon next to each one, and a description of what happened. And, like the Notifications stream, you can keep scrolling down to the bottom of the list, and the list will refresh itself, showing you older notifications. Clicking a notification displays the relevant bit of Google+: a post, a list of people who recently added you, and so on.
Unlike on the iPhone, you can control your notifications right from the Google+ Android app. While viewing the app’s main page or the Notifications list, hit your Android device’s Menu button, and then choose Settings from the black tray that pops up. You’ll see a list of settings that lets you can choose if and how Google+ gets your attention. You can set the app to vibrate (or not), give Google+ its own ringtone to distinguish it from text messages and other notifications, or turn notifications off entirely.
Tap the “Notification settings” entry, and you’ll be taken to a more detailed menu, where you can decide which types of actions you want to be notified about on your phone. Making these changes on your Android phone is the same as making them on the Google+ settings page (Controlling Which Notifications You Receive), and you’ll see them reflected when you next check your Google+ settings.
iPhone
On an iPhone running the latest software (iOS 5, which was released in October 2011), you’ll see notifications on the “Slide to unlock” screen that appears when you turn your iPhone on. If you happen to be looking at your phone when a Google+ notification arrives, it appears in a small white bar that drops down from the top of the screen. You can then swipe down on this bar with your finger to bring up the Notifications screen to see, among other things, the latest Google+ activity.
If you’re running the slightly older iOS 4 software, you’ll