Growl

I've spent a bit of time playing with Growl today. Basically, it's a program which provides a very neat framework allowing OS X applications which know how to talk to Growl to funnel status messages via a single program instead of each popping up a different custom dialog box in a different place on screen and using their own style. It doesn't sound like much, I know, but it's much simpler to keep an eye on a stream of messages in one place and format than it is to watch several program windows for status messages and popup windows. As more programs support Growl it'll become even more useful than it is already as a way to keep OS X tidy.

So far, of the programs I use daily Synergy, Ecto and Apple Mail can use Growl, and whilst I'm not 100% convinced that the output of the current plugin for Apple Mail is useful – it puts up a window for each incoming email, displaying the first few lines of the message, whereas I'd rather see a single window giving a nice, compact list showing the sender and subject for each of the messages received in that download – I'm already in love with the basic concept.

Between Growl and Geektool (which makes it easy for me to keep an eye on OS X's system logs in a much prettier and more customizable way than piping the logs through less in a console window allows) I feel rather better informed about what my computer's up to.