How to Find out what your Mac’s doing, with Growl

How to Find out what your Mac’s doing, with Growl
Mac Tip #410, 11 November 2009

Growl lets you know when things happen on your Mac.

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Growl tells you what’s up

I like to know what’s going on on my Mac — especially if I’ve set it to a task like uploading files that may take a while. I go off and do something else, but like to know once the task has finished.

That’s why I use Growl, a freebie that lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen.

For example, say I set my Mac to uploading a few hundred or thousand files to my website. That takes quite a while. I let the files upload in the background and switch to reading email, blogging, catching up on newsfeeds or some other activity.

With Growl, once the uploads are finished a special Notification window appears on screen to tell me what just happened.

Growl also alerts me as new emails arrive into my Gmail account. At a glance, and without switching to my email application, I can thee the subject and sender of each message and a few words from the message itself.

Growl has many options

After installing Growl go to the System Preferences and click on the Growl icon. Now you can configure how Growl behaves for each application that supports it.

In my video I show Growl reporting the results of a Replace All operation on a text file in the TextWrangler application.

To configure Growl notifications for a particular Application, select the Application in the Growl System Preference pane, then click the Configure… button. Configuration options appear, offering both Application Settings and Notifications tabs.

Display Style

Growl has many styles for the notification window, and can even speak to you. For the video I downloaded an extra style which had a striking yellow and black theme. Other styles use discreet grey or blue, images or other designs. Try them out to find which ones you prefer.

Growl lets you choose different styles of notification for different events, even within one application. Look under the Application Settings tab.

Notification corners

Notifications from Growl appear in one corner of the screen. Under the Application Settings tab I select which corner each Application should use. For TextWrangler I chose the bottom left corner as that was more convenient for my video. In reality I find the bottom right corner works well for most applications.

Notification settings

Under the Notifications tab select an action from the Notification drop-down menu. In my TextWrangler example I selected the Replace All action.

Then choose specific settings for the Notification: Display Style, how long to Stay On Screen, Priority and whether or not to Play a Sound.

Hazel supports Growl

Last week’s Tip was about using Hazel to help keep your Mac tidy. Hazel is one of the Applications that supports Growl.

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