What are some cool things I should be doing with Growl?

July 8, 2009 11:37 AM

What are some cool things I should be doing with Growl?

I just bought Prowl for my phone, so I've been thinking about how I use Growl again. I'm trying to think of cool things to do with Growl, beyond being notified when I get new mail. Anyone have any cool ass tips or tricks? (Previously)

posted by chunking express to Technology (7 answers total)

I love growl, but please note that it's just a notifications platform, so it's not like you're going to use it for anything other than "hey, something happened!"

That being said, I thing that functionality in itself is a killer app for the whole platform, and apps with baked-in Growl support are a huge plus for me, so I've noted a few.

Adium is the best chat client on any platform, and has good growl support. Chax has your back if you just can't leave iChat behind.

Tweetie and Twitterriffic will growl tweets at you, if you're into that whole thing.

Actually, now that I've pulled up their (new!) site, I see they've added an applications directory that will certainly be of far more use than me.

I will tip you off to this gorgeous and obscure iPhonesqe Growl theme.

Thanks for the Prowl link, hadn't heard of it!
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism at 11:57 AM on July 8, 2009

I forgot to add: the best thing about Growl is just having it installed as you explore new apps. Growl support isn't usually something that gets top billing in a feature list, but when you're pleasantly surprised by that first notification, you know you have an app from a developer that really gets the Mac.
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism at 12:01 PM on July 8, 2009

just got prowl yesterday, and I use it as a low end gmail push notification, or for notifying me when my torrents are complete via transmission, or when someone has added files to my dropbox or pando. what I would love is if something like evocam had growl notifications, should my webcam pick up movement, i get alerted and can view the video online, but technically you can hack that together with a script, or set evocam to inform and attach a snapshot by email and get notified.
posted by spyke23 at 12:29 PM on July 8, 2009

I use HardwareGrowler - not too sure how handy it would be for the iphone, but it's useful for letting me know when my mouse battery is dead (if it could let me know before, that'd be even better!) or if my bluetooth keyboard decides to randomly disconnect. I get notified whenever a disc gets mounted, or removed - but this might not be hardwareGrowler functionality - as I've essentially had HardwareGrowler as long as I've had my mac.

I use Textmate + Transmit, so it's handy to know the keyboard shortcut to upload a file has worked by being notified via growl. Finally I use Last.Fm which growls the current song when it first starts.
posted by backwards guitar at 12:43 PM on July 8, 2009

I put this in my crontab to give me a little time pulse every 15 minutes:

0,15,30,45 * * * * /bin/date +\%m/\%d/\%y\%n\%H:\%M:\%S | /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -n BEEP -I /Applications/Countdown.app

posted by Caviar at 9:29 PM on July 8, 2009

If you're running a localhost copy of the Drupal CMS, I wrote a module that can pipe all of its internal watchdog messages through Growl. It is of limited usefulness, but it is a cool trick.

Basically, anything that can do command line 'stuff' can be piped into Growl for extra spiffiness.
posted by verb at 10:41 PM on July 8, 2009

Thanks for the ideas. I'm still trying to figure out other cool things to do with it.
posted by chunking express at 9:25 AM on July 13, 2009