Task bar notification icon doesn't work

Question

Task bar notification icon doesn't work

If I use the two-finger swipe on my Magic Trackpad, I can show the Notification Center in Mountain Lion. However, if I click the little icon in the task bar (far upper right corner), nothing happens. By "nothing happens", I mean the icon inverses color when I click on it, but the Notification Center sidebar does not appear. There is no error or any other indication of why it would not show. Is this normal behavior?

Intel Core 2 Duo iMac 21.5", 3.06 GHz + MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Jan 28, 2013 8:01 PM

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Answer 1

softwater

Level 5

5,556 points

Jan 28, 2013 9:10 PM in response to Michael Prewitt

That's what (is supposed to) happens when you click on it with the 'option' key held down; i.e., it toggles Notifications between on/off rather than opens the panel.

Is there some way your option key is accidentally jammed/pressed or have you changed the keyboard modifiers somehow/using an external keyboard?

Try seeing what happens when you press the icon with the 'option' key held down - perhaps the default setting have somehow got reversed.

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Answer 2

Jan 29, 2013 5:00 PM in response to softwater

With the option key pressed down, if I click on it, it doesn't even blink. (If I hold shift, control, or command, and click, it blinks, but still the panel does not open.) It does appear slightly grayed out, compared to the other taskbar icons. But I don't know why it would be disabled.

Here is a screenshot:

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Answer 3

Jan 30, 2013 9:16 PM in response to Michael Prewitt

Here is another small update: I noticed today that when I first log in after restarting OS X, the taskbar icon is not grayed out. Sometimes various notification alerts will appear at that time (usually calendar items). However, they are all "hung". That is, if I mouse over the notification alerts, or over the taskbar icon, I get the spinning beach ball. Eventually, after a minute or two, all the alerts will vanish and the taskbar icon will turn gray at the same time; from the looks of it, I would guess that a background process has crashed. But there is no indication in the Console app about what has happened. (There were no entries that corresponded to the time or that otherwise seemed significant.)

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Answer 4

softwater

Level 5

5,556 points

Jan 31, 2013 12:58 AM in response to Michael Prewitt

Log in to the the guest user account. Does the same thing happen?

If yes, power off the computer and reset the PRAM. To do so,

See the support article here for instructions:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

If no, log back in to the account with the problem, and remove everything from here:

 > System Preferences > Users & Groups | Login Items

By 'remove' I mean select all and hit the - minus key under the list, not check the 'Hide' button).

Restart the mac and test.

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Answer 5

Feb 1, 2013 7:24 AM in response to softwater

The problem did not occur in the guest account. So this indicated a problem unique to my user account.

I next used Cocktail to check a setting. It has a System > Misc > Disable Notification Center option; however, it was not checked (i.e., it was the default). But I tried disabling Notification Center and re-enabling it, and this caused Notification Center to start working. (The old "turn off and on" trick.) However, after rebooting, Notification Center was back to not working again. Obviously not a solution.

So then I tried removing all the login items. This actually worked. I had quite a few, so there's no telling which might have been the culprit. The next step will be to re-add the ones I need, one at a time, and keep an eye on Notification Center.

For future reference, these were the login items I removed:

FontExplorerXAutoload
Air Mouse Server
Caffeine
Default Folder X Helper
LaunchBar
Activity Monitor
TransmitMenu
Typinator
ShareToolAgent
MicrosoftMouseHelper
My Living Desktop Viewer
Google Drive
VMware Fusion Start Menu
ClustersHelper
AwakenHelper

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