Stu Halloway is a wise, wise man :) Even though I read about Growl in Pragmatic Automation, I didn't think anything of it, until Stu re-introduced it to me this weekend.
For those that don't know about it, Growl is an open source service for the Mac, which gives you a nice standard way to define user alerts. To start with, on the Windows side, think of the system tray fade away alerts that you get with IM tools, email, and the like.
However, wouldn't it be nice to NOT reinvent that wheel in every application. Growl gives you the flexibility to do just this. Apps can send messages to Growl, and users can determine how much they care about them, and the look and feel for these alerts (e.g. colors, where on the screen, even items such as "read it").
This is only the beginning though. If you take this to the next level, Growl can tie into external items. Have a text message sent, an email, a message to a MOM queue, and lighting up a lava lamp (Mike Clark talks about setting up build alerts).
I would love to see a Windows based version of Growl (and other OSes), and have them builtin to the OS'es. We should have one way to access this guy (sending messages to the service), and it would work everywhere. We could even have a JSR ;)
If you want to get all aspecty, you could write aspects that tie into various application code, and inject in these alerts.
Very cool stuff Stu! Growl joins my "I wish it was on Windows list", sitting next to QuickSilver :)
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