Posts Tagged
notifications
Reminders are a super way to keep you on track, especially if you can get into a work rut like me and forget there’s an entire world outside of your computer. I don’t just need to be reminded to check my to do list or go to the gym, though. I’ll be typing away and completely forget that it’s time to go home or, perhaps worse, that my laptop is running out of power.
A neat little app to help with all of that remembering, Notifi will create notifications based on your preferences. You tell it what’s important, and it let’s you know when you need to make a move. Notifi isn’t the only app of its kind, though, so can it hold its own? (more…)
Apple has been moving towards a more “mobile feel” with Mac OS for a while now. Lion introduced a few features like the Launchpad, Mission Control, and even some multi-touch gestures to make your Mac feel much more like an iPad or an iPhone.
The recently released Mountain Lion builds on that, by providing even more snappy goodies to the OS like increased compatibility with mobile devices through iCloud, a Game Center, social network integration, and, most notably, a newly introduced notification system called, quite fittingly, “Notification Center”.
How does it work? Where is it moving towards? What’s gonna happen to other apps, like Growl, that have done the same thing for quite a while now? Let’s take a look.
By accident or by design, Growl is most likely installed on your machine; if it isn’t, you should probably look into it. Many applications offer support for it and some even come bundled with it. Growl is one of those applications that one thinks should be native to OS X, but sadly, it isn’t. Though as Mountain Lion rolls out its own notification system, the future of Growl seems to be precarious. We’re still huge fans though and thought you’d enjoy a nice big dose of Growl goodness.
Here we have a group of sexy, sleek, and shiny Growl themes ready for you to download, install, and use at your discretion. At the bottom of the article, there are a few extra Growl notification styles that have not been coded. You can use these as inspiration. If you keep an eye on them, the designers may end up coding them.
If you’ve owned a Mac for more than a couple months, then chances are you’ve been encouraged to install an app called Growl, perhaps by another user or by an app that you are installing. Growl is the most popular notifications system available for Mac, and it has recently gotten a big revision that the developers claim to be the biggest one yet.
Want to see what it’s all about? Let’s take a look at all the changes Growl has had.
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There is no doubt that the iPhone made push notifications cool and took that idea mainstream for Apple fans. But like most things Apple, at first push notifications weren’t open to all third party apps at launch. When users were clamoring for a way to get notified of things as and when they happen, Boxcar jumped in and filled the void effectively.
Boxcar was an elegant solution and alerted users with instant push notifications for all your social networks, email accounts, RSS feeds and more. As Apple opened up push notifications to third party developers, the influence of Boxcar dropped down a bit, but with 1.2 billion messages delivered to date, it’s an app with no match.
To make the lives of information junkies everywhere easy, Boxcar has released a beta version for Mac making it a breeze to receive super fast notifications when someone comments, updates or messages you. Join me after the break to check out if the app is as good as its iOS counterpart.
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People have mixed opinions about notifications. Is it better to have a subtle popup appear every time an email arrives, or would you prefer to just check it manually?
And what about changing iTunes tracks, Twitter DMs, Dropbox uploads, and everything else that happens in the background. Should you be informed about all these events as well?
The worst case scenario would be that each of these events is handled by different applications, leading to a complex mess of different notification locations, styles, and sounds. Thankfully, we have an application called Growl that does a wonderful job of solving this problem.
Put simply, Growl is a central “notification server” for your Mac. It takes information from all your different applications, and shows relevant notifications in the same consistent way. You may even be running Growl without realising it, as it comes bundled with many popular Mac apps (though they’re not particularly happy about it…)
I’d be interested to hear what you think about notifications. Are you a Growl-lover, or do you prefer to work uninterrupted? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and vote in our poll above!
