Global notification system for Mac OS X

Sep 22, 2009 14:58 GMT  ·  By

The development team behind the powerful Growl notification system for Mac OS X has announced an update delivering fixes and improvements. The developers also confirm ongoing work on Growl 1.2 for 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Growl is best known for its ability to display notifications (although it can also be used in other ways). Notifications are a way for your applications to provide you with new information, without you having to switch from the application you're already in. For example, if you're writing something important, but also archiving something big (using a compression tool that supports Growl), the application will notify you when the process is over by displaying a notification in a corner of the screen (or even in the middle, if you so choose). Growl is very useful for those who use IM applications on a daily basis and, of course, an e-mail client.

According to the development team, changes in Growl 1.2 Beta 4 include:

- Fixed the displays pop-up menus' failure to list WebKit-based displays; - Changed fade time for most visual displays from three-fourths of a second to one-fifth; - Increased default time on screen from four seconds to five to compensate for the above change; - Assorted fixes to bugs discovered by Ted Kremenek using the Clang Static Analyzer; - Updated minimum system version of Growl to 10.4, matching reality.

Growl 1.2 Beta 4 now Supports Safari 4, according to the release notes, and actually requires the software in order to post notifications for users of the standard Mac web browser. The new version also fixes a small memory leak that occurred every time the user downloaded something.

Requiring Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or higher, Growl 1.2 Beta 4 is available for free download using the link below. Growl for Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Growl 0.7.6) is available here.

Download Growl (Free)