Growl

: This article is about the computer software. For the animal noise, see growling.

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 programming language, Perl, Python programming language, Tcl, AppleScript, and Java programming language programming languages, and comes with multiple display plugins, providing different styles for presenting the notifications.

Growl is at version 0.7.2 as of 08/28/05

= External links =

*[http://growl.info/ Growl homepage] *[http://trac.growl.info/trac/ Growl wiki and bug-reporter]