Growl notifications for your Mac

December 29, 2008 by Sukrit Dhandhania

Growl is a neat little application that handles all the notifications for your Mac. It takes all the messages being sent by the applications running on your computer and displays it in an unobtrusive manner. For example, when integrated with the Mail application it can show you a blurb of incoming mail which pops up and disappears as configured. It can inform you that the download that was going on is complete.

The image above is an example of the kind of display that Growl can give you.

Let’s try it out now. First step is to install Growl. Hop over to the Growl home page and download the latest release. After the download completes the disk image you downloaded should get mounted automatically. If not, double click on the downloaded “dmg” file to mount it. Inside you will find a file called “Growl.mpkg”. This is the installer for Growl. Double click on it to begin the installation. This is a pretty straightforward procedure. Follow the steps an complete the installation.

After the installation is complete there will be an entry for Growl in the Preferences window. So launch the preferences window. You will see there an icon like in the image below.

Click on the Growl button. This will launch bring you to the Growl configuration window. Here there will be a number of tabs.

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We will take a quick look at the first three tabs, General, Applications, and Display Options. As shown in the image above make sure that Growl in running and the option Start Growl at login has been checked.

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The second tab is to configure which applications’ notifications are to be handled by Growl. you can also click on the Configure option to further configure which actions to handle for a particular application.

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The third tab is to configure what you want the notifications to look like. I’m not too fond of the default appearance of the notifications. There are a few presets that are good. In the image above is the configuration I’ve settled with. Check out the options and see what you like, or you can download one of these 10 additional Growl styles.

Now that Growl is setup on your machine you should look around the web to look for more cool plugins for it. The Growl website has a list of supported applications. See if you can get Mail and Twitter notifications going with Growl.