Question

I want the user to be able to change the Notification Center system settings directly from my app without having to go to System Preferences app. I don’t know if this can be done at all so I’m willing to settle for having them click a button that directly links to the Notifications pane of System Settings. That way they can be toggling some preferences from my native preferences window, and just click a button to quickly change whatever in the SS notifications and be done with it.

Answer 1

Preference panes are standalone executables. When you want to open a particular one, just launch it:

[[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] 
    openFile:@"/System/Library/PreferencePanes/Notifications.prefPane"];

Obviously you might want to check if the file is there, which might not be the case on older OS X versions.