Throught the lifehacker blog, I found the following two services:
Snarl and Growl, two universal notification servers.

What does that mean?

Well, think about some applications you have, that just linger in the background and you have to check periodically. Most of these applications like Email and IM clients have one way of notifying you, when something happens. But all of those nottifications are individual and there is no central location, where you can decide the duration, the style and maybe even log those events.

Apple uses Growl for quite some time now. Rather than implement your own notification service and struggle to make it just like the user wants it, simply send a message to the notification service and let it handle the UI. Firefox for example sends out a notification when a download is started or finished.

What does that have to do with Smalltalk?  I know several applications, that would benefit from such service.  Probably not your average user driven application, rather the type, where the application does a specific job without user interaction.

Unfortunately, Snarl and Growl only offer libraries for C#/C++, Ruby, Perl and some other languages, but not Smalltalk. That’s why I took some time to write my own interface to Snarl. Now I can send any kind of notifications and messages to Snarl and they get displayed in the style I like and where I like them.
Especially nice, when you have some long running build scripts, so you see the stage of the build and know as soon as it’s done.

If you’re interested, just write an email to ost-dev@parcplace.net and we send you the small parcel.

If you have some suggestons, what we should blog about, please let us know.

Andreas
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