Growl

Growl was a global notification system for that predated the built-in system notifications feature. This allowed any application to issue notifications in several formats (the notifier windows themselves were customizable, and you got to pick from several kinds in the default install):

Unlike other alternatives such as , was licensed in the public domain and had and bindings (it was a framework, so any language with Objective-C bindings could interop with it, and it shipped with a small set of samples).

Resources:

Category Link Notes
Analogues Window.Growl

JavaScript snippet that displays Growl-like in-page notifications.

Snarl

for Windows. I find the name oddly appropriate to the platform.

Mumbles

a notification system for GNOME that uses my Python library

Windows port

somewhat official.

Extensions Yapper

A XMPP bridge.

Prowl

A Growl relay for the iPhone

Libraries Nathan's port

to Perl, Referenced here for ease of tracking.

Experimental, not really maintained.

to re-send notifications to machines behind a NAT firewall (1-to-n)

In Python, not really maintained anymore but working.

In PHP, of all things. Not really maintained as well, but still being used by a lot of folk.

Odds and Ends My UDP protocol diagrams

in .sxd format:

Scripts:

Melo’s x-notify shell script:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Runs script, and prints a notification with growl when it finishes
#
$*
growlnotify -m "Script '$*' completed" -s "Background script notification" &

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