A lot of OS X users are familiar with Growl, a customizable notification system with all kinds of uses. New e-mail, iTunes track changes, new instant messages -- Growl handles all of this stuff. Now there's a Growl-like jQuery plugin called jGrowl that lets you apply the same sort of notification in your browser window.

jGrowl supports different animation settings, as well as sticky messages that need to be clicked to close. The styling appears to be done with CSS, so plenty of customization should be available. If you're looking for a way to notify that's not obtrusive and doesn't require a pop-up window that steals attention from your site, give jGrowl a try.

If you're a devotee of Growl, the slick pop-up notification system for OS X, then you've probably got a wishlist of apps that need Growl support. Even some of the ubiquitous Apple apps like iCal and Address Book don't work well with Growl. No need to fret about that, though, just download OmniGrowl, and you can set Growl notifications for practically everything.

When we say practically everything, we mean OmniGrowl will give you Growl popups for traffic alerts, flight stats, weather, new RSS stories, daily deals on Woot, words of the day from the Oxford English Dictionary, and any potential leaks in your kitchen sink. Ok, we're just kidding about that last one, but OmniGrowl covers an impressive list of apps and functions. You don't have to go overboard, though: if you just want Growl for your iCal events and Address Book birthdays, OmniGrowl can handle that, too.

GrowlCamino is a plugin for the Camino web browser that posts Growl notifications during or after certain browser activities.

The Growl program is a universal notifier that delivers on-the-screen information for a number of Mac applications. Some programs, such as Adium and Firefox, are supported right out of the box. Others, like Camino, are not.

That's where the GrowlCamino plugin comes in.

Currently, GrowlCamino posts notifications for these events by default:

• Download Started (opens Downloads window)
• Short Download Complete (opens downloaded file)
• Download Complete (opens downloaded file)
• Download Failed (opens Downloads window)
• Popup blocked (opens relevant tab)
• Bookmarks Imported
• Bookmarks Exported

GrowlCamino also installs its own Preference Pane, with the option to suppress the Camino Downloads window and the option to turn off Camino's popup blocker notifications.

GrowlCamino 1.5 has just been released in beta; it requires Mac OS X.

[Via Softpedia]

As RSS becomes more and more of a vital tool for online media consumption and production with each passing day, the need for efficient and well-integrated RSS clients rings loud and true. NetNewsWire for Mac OS X is just such a client. Originally borne of (and still written and managed by) indie Mac dev Brent Simmons, it was purchased after v2.x in 2005 by NewsGator to help round out their empire of powerful RSS clients that now span Mac, Windows and even mobile devices.

More or less since its inception, however, NetNewsWire has been hailed as one of the best Mac apps of all time, and for a while (and possibly still) held the title of most widely used RSS reader on any platform, including Windows. NetNewsWire has earned these accolades by offering a powerful set of features in a well-designed UI, and integrating very well with other Mac OS X tools. It offers support for anywhere from ten to hundreds - if not thousands - of feeds, various methods for synching read/unread news item states between computers, a built-in tabbed browser based on WebKit (the same rendering engine Safari and many other Mac OS X browsers use), blogging to any number of desktop clients such as ecto and MarsEdit (another app originally developed by Simmons), synching open tabs between computers and posting them all as a linkdump to said blog editors, bookmarking in del.icio.us, AppleScript and much more. Today's version 3.0 milestone, however, takes NetNewsWire to an entirely new level.

New in this release is even more desktop integration, offering things like Spotlight searching of news items, adding blog authors to Address Book, support for microformats, Growl notifications of news item downloads, sending news items to Twitterrific (the Iconfactory's stellar Twitter client for Mac OS X) and more. Clippings can also be synchronized between computers and the web, and a plethora of UI and performance enhancements make NetNewsWire sing even better on both PowerPC and new Intel Macs.

Of course, you can take all this power for a test drive by downloading a demo from NewsGator, but if you fall for NetNewsWire like so many other RSS users, a license costs a mere $29.95.

[Update: Scott McNulty at our sister site, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, just published 5 questions with Brent Simmons, an interview with NetNewsWire's developer on his thoughts of the new release, why he prefers the desktop software to the AJAX hype and the choices he had to make when adding - or choosing not to add - new features.]

We're big fans of web stats packages, and Shaun Inman's powerful and flexible Mint is definitely near the top of our list. While Mint and its various plugins can watch all manner of web stats and there are even widgets to check some stats from the comforts of your desktop, Tyler Hall decided to go one step further and has built a pepper (i.e. - a plugin for Mint) simply titled php-Growl that can send some Mint statistics to Growl, the Mac OS X system notification utility. While it can take some configuring (the comments at the Peppermint Tea post where we found this offer a good overview), this sounds like a handy way to keep an eye on stats without having to furiously refresh your Mint page or run yet another Dashboard widget.

php-Growl is being hosted at Google Code and is distributed under the MIT License.

In the first sign I've seen of 3rd parties embracing Apps for your Domain, a developer named Ahmet Tahar Sakar has created a widget for Mac OS X's Dashboard that can check your domain's Gmail account. It even works with Growl, a system-wide notification utility that can allow any apps to hook in to display visual notifications of events like new email, song changes in iTunes and even device disconnections. Since I'm no longer using Google's services I haven't been able to test this out myself, but if you give it a go please share your thoughts with the rest of the class.

[via Gmail.pro]