Growl is a great little application

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You know, it's all about the little things in life. I recently installed and began using one of those great little things. Growl is a global notification application for Mac OS X. Here's the basic jist of what Growl does...

  • You post a new blog entry with ecto‚–Growl displays notification that the post was successfully posted.
  • You receive a new iChat message from a friend‚–Growl displays the buddy name of the sender.
  • iTunes plays a new track‚–Growl displays the title, artist, album, play length, your rating of that song, and the album artwork.
  • Mail.app downloads new email messages‚–Growl displays a new mail notification with the number of messages received (this feature requires GrowlMail).

Well, it doesn't get more basic than that. So, why is this application so great you ask? Good question.

  • A single notification mechanism that's consistent across all your applications. There's no need to set up notification preferences in individual applications.
  • Visual notifications can be nice in those quiet (or loud) settings. Growl does, however, have a speech notification option.
  • Growl is free! But I strongly recommend donating to the developers so that they can continue to update this great little app. I couldn't find a donation option on the Growl web site.

Not all applications send notifications to Growl but I've been surprised by a few. I use the Ymail notifier and Gmail Status and was pleasantly surprised to see Growl display new mail notifications for both. Here's a list of apps that are currently supported.

Give it a try!

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