Friday Pick: Growl

I’ve been using Growl for a few years now and it’s totally worth it. Trying to explain Growl is a little difficult because, well, it doesn’t really do anything. It notifies you when something else has done something. Like that kid in grade school who runs and tells on other kids when they hit or called names. That’s Growl, only grown up and now he’s head of security for a major corporation. Yeah.

Growl has the open API mindset, meaning that developers can make their application work with Growl, granting them access in order to let you, the user, know when things are happening or have finished on your computer. And developer have pulled through! There are Growl plugins for Mail and iTunes. Alfred, Cloud, Coda, Evernote, Handbrake, Skype, Spotify, Transmit, and Wunderlist are just a few of the apps that I have enabled on my Growl. When one of these applications completes or recieves something, a nice little notification on my screen pops up, not inhibiting my work, but gives me what I need to know. There’s even a plugin for After Effects to notify you when you’re render is done, and an iPhone app that will push Growls to your iPhone.

Let’s say you’re in Photoshop, working on the weekend graphic, and you’re in the zone. You’re music is blaring. You are not checking you’re email, but there is one email that you’re waiting for. Every time you get an email, a little Growl will show up on your screen with a From and Subject line. You no longer have to check in your dock for a red star and when that red star updates, Command-Tab over to see if that email came in. Now, you don’t have to leave Photoshop.

Another great example is Coda. Coda is an amazing web editor. When using Coda, you can work locally and then publish to your server. A lot of times, you’ll hit publish, Command-Tab over to Safari, hit Refresh and it may not look like anything has changed because the FTP hasn’t finished yet. You hit the server a second too soon. Well, Coda has a Growl notification letting you know when the Publish has finished, so you can Command-Tab over, wait the 500 milliseconds for the Growl, then hit refresh. This saves a lot of frustration when troubleshooting an actual non-existant problem…

In the past, Growl has been completely open and free, although now it’s $1.99 in the Mac App Store. Usually, this would upset me. I’m cheap. I don’t like paying the extra $.10 at a fast food restaurant for the upgrade. But (when I get Lion…), I will definitely be getting Growl as one of my first purchases.