Growl (software)

Infobox Software
name = Growl



caption = Growl's "General" preferences in System Preferences running on Mac OS X Leopard.
developer = The Growl team led by Christopher Forsythe
latest release version = 1.1.4
latest release date = June 17, 2008
latest preview version =
latest preview date =
operating system = Mac OS X
platform = Macintosh
genre = Notification System
license = BSD
website = http://growl.info/

Growl is a global notification system for the Mac OS X operating system. 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 maintains a section of their website with a [http://growl.info/applications.php 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.

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

See also

* Snarl - clone for Windows

External links

* [http://growl.info/ Growl homepage]
* [http://trac.growl.info/ Growl wiki and bug-reporter]
* [http://www.cocoaradio.com/2006/06/chris_forsythe__1.html Chris Forsythe and Growl] , "CocoaRadio", 2006-06-05
* [http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15442 Interview with Chris Forsythe of Adium and Growl] , "OSNews", 2006-08-09