Growl is a global notification system for Mac OS X. This allows any application to issue notifications that it displays in several formats (the notifier windows themselves are customizable, and you get to pick from several kinds in the default install):
Unlike LanOSD, Growl is licensed in the public domain and has Perl and Python bindings (yes, boys and girls, it sets itself up in Library/Frameworks, which means it should work with any language, and comes with a small set of Xcode samples).
Similar Stuff:
- Mumbles, a notification system for Gnome that uses my Python code.
- Snarl - for Windows. I find the name oddly appropriate to the platform.
Resources:
There are plenty of Growl bindings, but for cross-platform purposes you're better off using the UDP network protocol (which was added on public release 0.7):
- My protocol implementation in Python
- My DBUS bridge in Python
- My other implementation in PHP (used on my web servers to flag anomalous conditions)
- Nathan's port to Perl
- One of the Ruby versions (this one is cross-platform)
- A notification relay to re-send notifications to machines behind a NAT firewall (1-to-n)
Clones:
- Window.Growl, a JavaScript snippet that displays Growl-like in-page notifications.
Scripts:
Melo's x-notify shell script:
#!/bin/sh # # Runs script, and prints a notification with growl when it finishes # $* growlnotify -m "Script '$*' completed" -s "Background script notification" &