nanovivid

Time for some more Mac geekery. On friday Growl 0.5 was released. Growl is a unified notification system for OS X that I’ve been using for a while now and it’s very cool. I do have to admit that it’s not the prettiest thing in the world right now, but better display plugins are coming.

Here are some of my favorite uses for Growl:

• Adium supports Growl for buddy signed on/off notifications and such. Follow these instructions to enable it.

• iTunes via Quicksilver. QS can use Growl for its notifications… but there’s currently a little work to get it going. First you have to change QS’s feature mode to Beta, then visit the plugins page from within Quicksilver. Install the Growl and iTunes plugins. Then under Actions, set Notification to use GrowlHelperApp and under iTunes, turn on recent track monitoring and track notifications. I’m using QS for iTunes track changes, so I get a notification whenever a new track comes up. (GrowlTunes does the same thing, but it’s an external program and I always have QS running anyway.)

• Email notification. I use a script instead of GrowlMail because it generates a notification for every message showing the sender and subject, rather than just a notification for each account that gets new mail (you can find a sample script in the Growl download). In Mail, go into Preferences, then Rules. Create a new rule set up like this:

  • If any of the following conditions are met: Every Message

  • Perform the following actions: Run AppleScript path to New Mail Notification.scpt

• Last but not least, I have to pimp my CallVantage dialer, which will generate a Growl notification when dialing a number.

♫ Magnolia - It’s All Vain (Sticky’s Refix)