Growl 1.1.3 has been released, bringing with it the official Leopard-friendly GrowlMail Extra.

Long-time Hawk Wings readers will remember that a beta-version of the GrowlMail Extra emerged on the Internet late last year. This new release is the real thing.

The main Growl app gains a number of improvements, including the ability to show notifications in every one of Leopard’s Spaces, the option to set a unique sound for each app’s alerts, and some bug fixes.

GrowlMail itself has been rewritten to remove the conflict with Leopard, and can now be installed on other start-up volumes.

Likewise, GrowlSafari now works with Safari 3.0, and other Extras get bugfixes and enhanced compatibility with Leopard.

The alerts looks nice, and now seems to drag a picture from Address Book for the sender if one is available, but uses the default Mail stamp icon if not.

This screenshot features an “iPhonesque” display style from MacThemes.

GrowlMail adds a preference pane to Mail.app in which you can set the way it reports alerts for more than one new email, the mailboxes it should monitor and more:

Growl and its Extras are freeware and available from the Growl web site .

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Eagle-eyed Hawk Wings reader Dave Foshee emails to say that he has spotted a Leopard-friendly beta version of GrowlMail.

He found the link in a post on the Google Groups Discussion list for Growl.

The poster is offering it as a beta and asking for feedback on how well it works.

It works very well for me, so I encourage you to give it a go yourself, especially if you are looking for a slick, visual notification summary of your email.

Of course, you will need to install Growl first.

[Thanks, Dave!]

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GrowlMail, the Mail-specific notification bundle for Growl doesn’t work under Leopard, although the next version (1.1.3) will work. If you are missing it and can’t wait, this applescript workaround will help.

Kevin Way posted an AppleScript on his web site two months ago that can be attached to a Mail.app rule.

It passes notifications of new messages directly to Growl, and since it is rule-activated, you can use conditions to make it tell you only about emails from particular people. Of course, you could also set it to match on particular words in the subject of the mail, or only for emails from a particular account, or for whatever other condition you set in the rule.

I found that the latest beta of MailTags stopped me creating a rule with an applescript attached, but uninstalling it, creating the rule and then loading MailTags again seems to work fine.

The end result is a nice Growl alert:

A thread on the Growl forum contains more tips and tricks for tweaking the script.

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Some time ago, while I wasn’t watching, Thomas Aylott updated his clever scripts which make iCal able to pipe its alarms through to Growl.

Previously, when Hawk Wings last blogged it, the process of activating the scripts was rather difficult and involved a lot of digging around in iCal’s guts.

Now Thomas has packaged up the scripts in a disk image along with step-by-step instructions on how to install them:

Four steps and you are done. Then you can enjoy Growl’s alerts instead of the iCal’s big scary messages with the jangly alarm clock.

The disk image is available on Thomas’s web site.

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A poster on macOSXHints has posted an applescript for Quicksilver which provides a quick list of words, characters and lines in the form of a Growl alert.

After copying the text of the script to Script Editor and saving it off in your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder, all you need to do is select some text, activate a “Command window with Selection” and then type “word” (or whatever matches the name you gave to the script when saving),:

The Growl alert is quick and simple:

Of course, this is not the only way to get a word count in Quicksilver.

Spell Catcher X’s statistics service is available within Quicksilver and provides even more information, including how much fog is in your prose:

Spell Catcher X is shareware (USD 39.95) but good enough to be in my Top Ten Things every Mail.app user should have.

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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 .

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