Windows only 
One of the things that I think all operating systems lack is a universal way for applications to display notifications. Yes, there are those pesky popup balloons on Windows, but using that to display notifications for things like new emails or messages is flat out wrong.
I’m not sure why all of the operating systems aren’t coming equipped with notification systems yet, but third-party developers are starting to take it upon themselves to create easy-to-use universal notification systems. Growl on Mac OS X started this whole idea, and it looks like something similar is making its way over to the Windows side. It’s called Snarl.
What’s nice about programs like this is that they provide a central location to enable and disable notifications for all applications that use the system. Right now Snarl ships with several different types of system notifications, and extensions can also be downloaded to add additional functionality. These extensions add compatibility for programs like Firefox, Pidgin, Songbird, Thunderbird, and more.
Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of supported programs at this point, but that’s because they partly rely on developers to take it upon themselves to add support for Snarl. There’s a developers section on the site dedicated just for that purpose, and hopefully in the future extensions for popular apps like Outlook will be available.
Snarl Homepage [via Lifehacker]
Good idea, but it’s really Microsoft who should be implementing a notifications system in Windows. Maybe they’ll buy these guys.
Ah they’ve picked up development again. I wonder if they’ve improved. Last time I tried it, this application was very buggy.
That would be awesome especially if this application takes off. That way they will already have people who’ve adopted the technology, and they can just continue to advance it. Apple’s kinda in the same boat where at this point they’d have to implement things the same way that Growl does since so many different apps leverage its technology.
It was slow for awhile, and hopefully the added polish will attract more developers to implement the feature.
Ok, so where was this when I was actually into Windows?
Well, it’s been out for over a year. So it was probably available when you were into Windows, but you just didn’t know about it. This kind of thing takes awhile to catch on though since it has to have extensions for popular applications before anyone will start using it.
I tried Snarl months (perhaps even years) ago, but not many developers seemed to use it. The concept is good, but we need more people to jump on this bandwagon.
The downside of Snarl is that you’ll have to keep the Snarl service running in the background if you want to use their notification system. I hope that they’ll come up with a standalone DLL that can work around this.
That would be cool, and I’m sure more people would be willing to install it if that were the case. That way it would use any resources unless a notification was being displayed. Unfortunately they’d probably have to rewrite everything from scratch to get it to work that way.
Well, a positive user experience is a must if they want Snarl to catch on bigtime. Having to rewrite an app from scratch is every developer’s nightmare but hey, it’s a tough business.