Nearly every application on your computer these days needs to notify you of something at some point. Your IM client tells you your best friend just signed on. Mail tells you that an important email from your boss for a status request has just arrived. Toast informs you your CD is done burning. Currently, every one of these notifications arrives in a different manner. Some are audible, others visual, others a mix, or else just a message somewhere you can check when you get to it.

Growl provides a central notification system (powered by its own notifications server.) Applications can register notifications with Growl that they will send out, and then inform Growl when these events happen. Growl takes care of the rest, including displaying them.

The user can choose what notifications they want to see, and even how they want them to look, all from a single preference panel in System Preferences. They can even disable individual notifications for each application, or set each application to display notifications differently - or all the same - without leaving that same pane.

Die Idee finde ich vom Prinzip her sehr nett. Und auch wenn es nicht meinen Geschmack trifft, so sieht es doch nett aus. Und anscheinend finden es auch ein paar Entwickler ganz so, so zB verfügt gCount [Am Rande, ich habe übrigens schon wieder sechs Google-Einladung zu vergeben, wer noch möchte, einfach eine Mail senden] in der aktuellen Version über growl-Support. Auch für Mail, iTunes und Adium X und Fire gibt es bereits ein Plugin.

Growl befindet sich jedoch noch in der Entwicklung. Wer möchte kann sich den Quellcode herunterladen und selbst compilieren.