2 Cool Things You can do with Growl on OS X

Tuesday, Feb. 7 2006 | Author: AlexTan

For those of you who are Mac-heads like myself, I’ve found a great, lightweight, background application that increases the OS X experience. That application is called Growl. I know, I know, Growl has been around for a while but there are many people who don’t know about it. Growl works like this, once it’s installed there is a System Preference panel which allows you to change the settings. Many developers build their applications to work natively with Growl, as can be seen here in this list. Download Growl before doing any of these steps, here.

Notifications like this appear in the top right of your screen using Growl

1. Find Out When Macs Log onto your Network

Using a combination of the open-source FTP client Cyberduck and Growl you can find out when other computers running Mac OS X log onto your computer. I use this when I’m in public areas, it’s just fun to see when someone is opening or starting up their computer.

Step 1. Download Cyberduck
Step 2. Open Cyberduck, and keep it running.
Step 3. Wait for someone to open their Mac and a Growl notification to appear in the top right corner.

2. Become notified when a new iTunes song Plays

Using GrowlTunes and iTunes, Growl will notify you of when the song changes and what song that it is changing to.

Step 1. Install GrowlTunes from the Growl Disk image (it’s bundled)
Step 2. Open iTunes and listen to music.

I think in the future, more developers will begin building Growl into their applications, or maybe Apple will incorporate a similar feature in Mac OS X: Leopard.

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