How To Automatically Enable Do Not Disturb While Screen Sharing Your Desktop [macOS]
There’s nothing like a notification to interrupt a meeting. Meetings are no longer confined to a single room. They’re virtual and there are apps dedicated to making virtual meetings possible and they come with video chat and screen sharing tools. Unfortunately, these tools don’t have much control over your system’s notifications. Muzzle is an app built specifically for this purpose. It automatically enables Do Not Disturb while screen sharing is active on your desktop. At present, it support Slack, FaceTime, BlueJeans, Google Hangouts, and Join.me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support Skype just now at least not reliably. The developer doesn’t list it among the supported apps but past change logs show that it has trouble detecting when screen sharing in Skype is in progress.
Enable Do Not Disturb While Screen Sharing
Download and run Muzzle. In order for the app to work, you need to give it access to accessibility settings. That’s really all the set-up required for Muzzle to run.
Muzzle runs quietly in the menu bar. When you start sharing your screen over one of the supported apps, it automatically enables Do Not Disturb so that no notifications appear on your screen and interrupt or embarrass you during a meeting.
Muzzle doesn’t silence notifications itself. It relies wholly on macOS’ Do Not Disturb feature which, as you know, allows you to add exceptions. With Muzzle running and Do Not Disturb enabled, those exceptions that you added will still be there and you will see alerts that you’ve allowed even when Do Not Disturb is on.
Screencasts & Games
Muzzle is built for embarrassment free screen sharing. It’s basically there to keep notifications off your screen if you can’t remember to enable Do Not Disturb before you start a call or screen sharing session. Of course, this isn’t the only niche where an app like this could be useful. The app can be equally useful to anyone who regularly records screencasts. In order to do that it would have to support screencasting apps and it can start with QuickTime.
Games are another area where the app could be useful whereby if you’re playing a game in full screen mode, Do Not Disturb will be enabled automatically. This is by no means simple because there are a lot of games out there and there’s also the fact that a notification doesn’t interrupt a game the same way it interrupts a screen sharing session. That said, the concept is great and it has lots of other areas where it can be useful.
