Snarl is a notification software for Windows inspired by the famous Mac application Growl, that allows the user to receive notification from applications and other system alerts through a universal notification system, i.e. Snarl. Snarl allows you to substitute the native Windows notifications with Snarl notifications thereby allowing you to control how and when applications display alerts on the screen.
Snarl is as stylish as the original Growl with plenty of sleek skins and user adjustable colors, fonts, alpha-blending, transparency, shadow size etc.
Snarl uses a plug-in system through which notifications from third party applications are routed through to Snarl. The user is allowed to control the alert’s behavior, occurrence and looks. Currently Snarl includes support for a number of popular applications like iTunes, Windows Live Messenger, Pidgin, foobar2000, Firefox, Thunderbird, Winamp etc. You will need to download and install these plug-ins individually.
Once installed, you will start receiving notifications from these applications through Snarl. If any of these applications annoys you with their alerts or steals focus from the current window, you will be now able to prevent it. Snarl also includes some default notifications like hourly time alerts, battery power alerts etc.
Snarl can display several messages at any time in several message windows one on top of the other. Snarl notifications can either be cancelled by clicking on them, or left to disappear automatically if ignored for a period of time. The user can configure whether to display visual or audio alerts, the position of the alert window as well as duration of the alert. These settings can be made to override the default settings of the supported application.
How useful Snarl will be for you depends on whether your favorite/preferred application is supported by it. Tools and guides on how to develop plug-ins for their application are already available for developers. We just have to make them aware of it.
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