Growl is an application that serves as a complete notification system for your Mac; Growl provides you with visual notifications of something that has happened on your Mac. What’s great about this application is the notifications are in real time, which means that as soon as your Mac knows about something, you know about it through Growl.

What’s important to understand is that Growl doesn’t notify you by itself. Growl links to other applications on your Mac and will give you notifications according to what’s happening in those applications. So, for example, you link Growl to your Mail application and it will alert you of new emails. Or you can link Growl to iChat and it will alert you of new messages. There is an enormously long lists of applications that work side-by-side with Growl.

Another incredibly useful feature is that Growl continues to work while you are away from your computer. While your computer is asleep, Growl will continue to collect information and then display it to you once you begin working again.

Growl unfortunately can be very brutal on your CPU. Growl is constantly checking the applications you have linked to it, which is great for real time updates but not so great when it comes to the speed of your computer. Constantly having an application working in the background will cause your computer to run slower than otherwise and it will cause your battery to drain more than otherwise.

Growl also has been having some issues regarding lack of Mountain Lion support and the latest version of the application containing bugs.

As it stands currently, Growl has been very unstable and is constantly freezing. In addition, simple notifications like new emails are not working with Mountain Lion. After further research, it is clear that this is a widespread problem, and unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any fix in sight.

Growl’s usefulness is honestly unlimited. But in it’s current state, it is nearly impossible to be productive. While future updates may improve the freezing and lack of Mountain Lion support, it still won’t change the fact that Growl will be very heavy on your Mac’s resources. If you are able to get past these annoying quirks, then Growl might just completely change the way you use your computer.

Price: $3.99

Version discovered: 1.4

Supported OS: OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor

Download size: 3.5mb

Growl homepage