What is growl used for

Skip to main content A Growl notification. Aurich Lawson. Further Reading Hands-on: Growl 2. He covers Apple and display tech, as well as hardware and software for developers and creative professionals. He has been writing about technology for 15 years, and is an AR and game developer for iOS and other platforms.

Growl is a notification system for OS X. Growl has been around since , and was originally called Global Notifications Center. The name was changed to Growl like the noise a dog makes since we felt the name Notifications Center was too geeky. We were wrong about that haha. By using Growl, you will also catch up with previous notifications which will be helpful when you are not away from your computer for Growl has a similar version for iPhone and iPad called Prowl.

The newest version of this software is Growl 2. Applications which could be used with Growl There are various categories that support Growls. From the browser category, the applications that could be used are Firefox, Camino and Opera Browser.

From the chat category, there are many applications that support this software such as Conversation, Aquatik, Trillian and more. Just create a GrowlConnector object including target hostname and port if reaching out to a remote machine, if desired , and then include some simple information about the application being registered:.

The icon can be a filename, URL or array of bytes. Both of these classes, by the way, come from the GrowlConnector namespace. Growl thinks of notifications as grouped by type. Growl wants applications to register these notification types so the user can configure how each kind of notification will be handled.

A new Growl client needs to define its notification types and then pass them to the GrowlConnector. Register method to complete registration:. The first parameter is the string that your code will use to indicate the type of notification. Like the Application object, NotificationType also has an Icon property. This allows for different icons to be displayed along with the text of the message on a per-notification-type basis.

Can You Read Me Now? Sometimes you like to know what the user did with the notification. Did she just close it without looking, or did she actually read the message?