Growl
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses, see Growl (disambiguation).
| Growl | |
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| Developer: | Growl team, led by Christopher Forsythe |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 0.7.4 / 2006-01-24 |
| OS: | Mac OS X |
| Use: | global notification system |
| License: | BSD |
| Website: | Growl homepage |
Growl is a global notifications system for the Mac OS X operating system. Different applications can use Growl to display small notifications about events which the user deems important, in a consistent manner. Users can fully control their notifications, developers do not have to spend a lot of time developing notifications, and the Growl developers can spend time concentrating on the usability of notifications.
Below is a screenshot of the Applications tab of the Growl pane added to the Mac OS X System Preferences. This pane allows users to enable and disable 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 a small amount of 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 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.
[edit] Applications using Growl
The Growl notification system is used by over 160 applications, including:
Plugins or scripts exist to add Growl notifications to iChat, iTunes (GrowlTunes), Mail, Thunderbird, Safari and Microsoft Entourage.
The Growl Project maintains a section of their website with a listing of applications that support Growl, either inherently or with add-ons. A few applications (mostly scripts) are not listed because no dedicated webpage exists for them, so the developers cannot link to them.
