OmniGrowl is described by its developer as “an expandable framework for sending Growl Notifications for applications that do not natively support Growl”.
(Growl 
is a pop-up notification system for OS X that installs itself as a Preference Pane. Depending on how you work, Growl can either enhance your productivity or distract you to death.)
Once installed, users can set it through Growl’s main preferences to provide alerts from iCal, Address Book, iTunes, power status changes (battery or AC), RSS feed alerts, SMART hard-drive failure reports, alerts from Software Update and more.
It offers a full range of options for iCal alerts, each of which can be set independently or even switched-off altogether: Alerts for iCal events in one hour, 30 minutes or 10 minutes, alerts for all-day events and to-dos the day before.
Alerts can also be set for birthdays stored in Address Book and iCal.
In deference to GrowlTunes and other modules which display iTunes track changes, its iTunes settings are turned off by default. Still, the developer includes it as a way of making OmniGrowl a comprehensive app and potentially to reduce the number of apps one needs to run.
It can also display hourly alerts from RSS feeds. CNN, BBC and The New York Times are included by default, but the interface makes it easy to add extra feeds (up to 16 in total) that you particularly want to keep an eye on.
A recent update adds support for AFP alerts, “a pretty specialized need” that lets you know when AFP users connect or disconnect to your computer.
If you live in Canada (oddly the home of a disproportionate number of Mail.app-related developers), it now also tells you about local concerts and events by polling the Canadian OnTour web site.
It is open source and designed with customisation in mind (source code and some instructions included).
OminGrowl is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site .
Does this thing actually work for you? I got an Applescript error upon launch, no notifications, and it would not add itself to the login items. I sent a note to the developer, but just wanted to see if you had better results.
That’s puzzling. It worked fine for me. I’ve had it running all day without a single hitch.
I know it is unfashionable these days, but I do actually try out things before posting them if I possibly can ;-)
Hmm. I cannot even open the source files in Xcode to build it myself. Guess I’ll have to wait to hear back from the developer.
My suggestion to anybody who is not The Omni Group: don’t name your product by CamelCasing the word Omni with some other word.
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I have to agree with Daniel… bad naming choice, because I read this and thought “oh the people who made OmniOutliner are really supporting growl now”, but it’s clear after reading this that that’s not the case… he’s lucky he’s not charging for it!
I really like this feature.
However I can’t figure out how to add new feeds to the hourly headlines.
Where’s the interface!?
And is there a way to follow a link to the stories in the hourly headlines?
How does this compare to the applescript hack that makes Growl work with iCal properly?
That one enables Growl alerts directly from within iCal using the existing iCal alert system.
This thing seems to have it’s own system for polling iCal for data at specific intervals.