Growl (software)

Growl
Developer(s) The Growl team led by Christopher Forsythe
Stable release 2.1.3 / 29 October 2013
Written in Objective-C
Operating system Mac OS X, Windows XP or later
Platform Macintosh, Windows
Type Notification system
License BSD
Website growl.info

Growl is a global notification system and pop-up notification implementation for the Mac OS X and Windows[1] operating systems. Applications can use Growl to display small notifications (in a consistent manner) about events which the user deems important. 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 can be used in conjunction with Apple's Notification Center that is included in recent versions of OS X (Mountain Lion 10.8 and higher).[2] [3]

Details

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 selects 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 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. Display plugins include visual styles as well as the ability to send notifications via email, SMS, or push notifications.[4] Plugins or scripts exist to add Growl notifications to iChat, Mail, Thunderbird, Safari, and iTunes.

The Growl website lists applications that install Growl without the user's permission. Adobe Creative Suite 5 is one of them. Adobe has published a blog post apologizing for installing Growl on users' systems without permission, and says that they are "actively working to mitigate the problem".[5] Adobe has an article in their knowledge base explaining what notifications CS5 sends and how to remove Growl.[6]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Growl for Windows". Growl for Windows. Retrieved 2010-05-29.
  2. ↑ "Hands-on: Growl 2.0 integrates with Notification Center on OS X, iOS". Ars Technica.
  3. ↑ "Quick Tip: Growl vs. Notification Center". Computer Skills Tuts+.
  4. ↑ "Howl - a Growl app for iPhone and iPad". Tanka Tech. Retrieved 2010-06-08.
  5. ↑ "Growl Installation with Adobe CS5". Adobe. Retrieved 2010-10-29.
  6. ↑ "Disabling Growl notifications in Adobe Creative Suite 5 applications". adobe.com.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Growl (software).