Growl is one of those handy little apps that I love, but can used for evil or for good. Growl is simply a notification system that pops up little messages you can read, and then fade away after a couple of seconds. Lots of mac applications support growl, like adium, cyberduck, firefox 3, but my favorite use for it is when listening to music (which I’ll post on later).

It’s also very customizable. There are a bunch of built in styles for notifications that you can change the appearance of. I mostly use this one, called “smoke”: You can also choose different styles for different notifications coming from different programs form the preferences screen.. For example, I have notifications from important programs (like adium) at the top right of my screen so i see them. Less important ones I have slide up from the bottom. My brain has gotten used to it so much that I often miss/completely ignore the bottom ones, which is what I want so I don’t feel as interrupted. (That’s where I put my music notifications).

What I like best about growl is that I can get info without switching contexts. For example, If I’m typing an email and someone sends me an instant message, growl pops up a little notification with the message in it which I can read, decide if I want to respond immediately or not, and then either keep working, or decide to switch over and answer.

The evil in growl (for me) comes in the interruption. I used to use a plugin for Apple Mail called Growl Mail, which would pop up a notification when I received an email with the first couple lines of the email in there. Because of how I’m wired, as soon as I know about an email I start thinking about it and my response to it. In reality, there’s no email that needs my immediate attention. More urgent requests are instant messaged or phoned to me. Constantly seeing new emails roll in was really hurting my ability to focus on the task in front of me and be productive. I would start one task, receive an email which I couldn’t resist, stop working on my current task, and switch to responding to that email, work on that for a while, and then come back until another email came in. To be productive in higher level brain function tasks, you’ve got to focus. Since I’m often working on a task related to an email, shutting my email client off wasn’t the answer. Removing Growl Mail was.

The other side of that coin is sometimes you want to be interrupted. When I’m uploading a large file via ftp, I can go do something else, and then cyberduck will tell me when it’s done and I can take the next action. You get the idea.

LIfehacker also has an article on Growl with some pictures.

The bottom line: growl is awesome. Use it for apps when you want to be interrupted. Try it out and make it your own.