Notifications for your Mac with Growl

Growl is often listed as one of the must-have applications on any new Macs. Growl’s premise is simple: Allow applications to communicate short messages, alerts to the user.

Growl is installed as a pref pane in the System Preferences menu. From there, it can be customised in many ways. You can select which applications have permission to send alerts for Growl to display. You can also customise the type of alerts that pop-up: either the default one or a unique alert for Skype messages, calls, etc. All this, Growl enables – easily and quickly.

For example when a file in a shared folder in Dropbox has been updated, a quick notification pops up and disappears within a few seconds. That is all the information the end user needs. There is no need to pause work but you know something has happened. Over the years, the support for Growl has grown tremendously to the point that today it is taken as a given that any new smart application will have Growl support.

I highly recommend Growl for all Mac users – techies and new users alike. The recent upgrade to version 1.2 added Snow Leopard compatibility. So, hop on over to the Growl web site and download it today. Trust me, you too will soon list this a must-have app for your Mac.