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.

Here are 10 lesser-known Growl styles that look a lot nicer than the defaults:

If you use a Mac, you might be familiar with Growl, a system-wide notification system that allows apps to notify you of events - new email, new IMs, downloads finishing - with a customizable pop-up. Now Growl has been (sort of) ported to the iPhone as a great new app called Prowl. Prowl collects Growl alerts from your Mac for reading on your iPhone, and even includes push support. Effectively, this means that you can get push notifications on your phone from any Growl-compatible app on your computer.

The iPhone side of Prowl shows a nice clean list of all the notifications you've received, even if you don't have push activated. On the desktop side, Prowl is actually a Growl style, so you can assign it to the apps of your choice, or make it the default if you need to see every single notification on your phone. One of the uses of Prowl I was most excited about was pushing direct messages and replies from my desktop Twitter app. No Twitter app on the iPhone has push yet, so Prowl is a nice way to fill in the gaps.

Prowl does require you to have Growl installed, and you have to sign up for an account. The registration process is extremely quick, though, with just a username and password required.

When a desktop app does something that needs your attention, you know about it because of system-wide notifications. With web apps, on the other hand, it's easy to miss something that happens when your apps are open in another window or tab. Yip aims to solve that problem by offering a unified web app notification system in Firefox.

Yips is a Firefox port of the notification APIs from Fluid and Prism (the two major ways to turn web apps into desktop apps). With the Yip add-on installed, Firefox will display alerts in your browser window for web app events like an incoming message in the popular multi-chat app, Meebo, or a new reply in the Twitter client Filttr. In fact, Yip will work with practically any site that supports either Fluid or Prism notifications.

If you're a Mac user, you get an added bonus: Yip is compatible with Growl, so you can customize it just like any other set of Growl notifications. With the popularity of web apps continuing to rise, it's somewhat amazing that a unified notification system hasn't been implemented at the browser level. Will we see something like Yip as a standard feature?

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]