Filed under: Utilities, Features, Macintosh
10 hot Growl styles to make your pop-up alerts really pop
by Jay Hathaway Oct 28th 2009 at 3:00PM
Growl provides customizable pop-up alerts for hundreds of Mac apps, making sure you never miss an important chat message or completed download. You can use Growl to set an alert for just about anything, and you can also make Growl notifications look practically any way you want. The built-in themes and the list on the official Growl Styles page don't even begin to cover all the options for gorgeous notifications, from the minimal to the very flashy. 
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Richard said 5:39AM on 10-29-2009
I don't really "get" Growl I have to admit. Don't applications which require a pop up already have one built into the code? Why would they implement support for an external one (which it isn't guaranteed that the user will have installed) just so a pop up can look, well, prettier?
I tried the Windows version and as a result I got a pop up whenever I plugged in or out a USB modem and when the time hit the hour. Woo, exciting stuff. All my other popups were handled by the applications themselves.
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Japan-four said 8:01PM on 10-29-2009
> Why would they implement support for an external one just so a pop up
> can look, well, prettier?
Think of Growl as a control center for notifications. It allows the user to decide when, where, how, how long and IF to display notifications on a per application basis. It also allows for the sending and receiving of notifications over a network and it is very easy to let i.e. command-line scripts generate notifications through Growl.
Theming is really 'just an extra'...
Marky said 8:21AM on 10-29-2009
Many programs do not have their own notification function built in and many choose to use Growl rather than reinventing the wheel.
If I jump onto a Mac without Growl installed it's noticeable and I miss it.
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