Growl

Growl's "General" preferences in System Preferences running on Mac OS X Leopard.
Developer(s)	The Growl team led by Christopher Forsythe
Stable release	2.0 / 2009-11-17
Operating system	Mac OS X
Platform	Macintosh
Type	Notification System
License	BSD
Website	http://growl.info/

Growl is a global notification system for the Mac OS X and Windows^[1] operating systems. Applications can use Growl to display small notifications about events which the user deems important, in a consistent manner. This allows users to fully control their notifications, application developers to spend little time creating notifications, and Growl developers to concentrate on the usability of notifications.

Growl installs itself as a preference pane added to the Mac OS X System Preferences. This pane enables and disables Growl's notifications for certain applications entirely, or select specific notifications for each application.

Applications register a "ticket" with Growl, then send arbitrary notifications which Growl receives and displays. Each notification provides some information, such as: "Download finished," or the name of the current iTunes track. Users can customize the display and turn notifications on and off.

Growl includes bindings for developers who use the PHP, Objective-C, C, Perl, Python, Tcl, AppleScript, Java, and Ruby programming languages, and comes with multiple "display plugins," providing different styles for presenting the notifications.

The Growl Project website has a list of applications that support Growl, either inherently or through add-ons.

Plugins or scripts exist to add Growl notifications to iChat, Mail, Thunderbird, Safari, and iTunes (GrowlTunes).

[edit] See also

• Snarl, a Growl-inspired notification system for Windows.
• Growl For Windows, another clone for Windows http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/
• libnotify - similar library for Gnome
• KNotification - similar library for KDE

[edit] External links

• Growl homepage
• Growl wiki and bug-reporter
• Chris Forsythe and Growl, CocoaRadio, 5 June 2006
• Interview with Chris Forsythe of Adium and Growl, OSNews, 9 August 2006
• Small Growl and applescript tutorial
• La Capi Growl Style
• Mumbles Project - a Growl-inspired notification-application for Linux
• http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/ Growl for Windows

[edit] Notes

1. ^ http://www.growlforwindows.com/