Growl - The iPad and immersive computing - O'Reilly Radar

This made me chuckle.

The iPad and immersive computing - O'Reilly Radar:

"I love how focused I am using an iPad, versus working on a laptop. New mail isn't constantly arriving; tweets aren't Growling into view; I don't even have an RSS reader installed."

When Growl first appeared I couldn't imagine why a sane Mac user would want it. How could you make fun of Windows and its incessant, work-stopping notification balloons, and want the same sort of behavior on your Mac? Better to see an alert when something goes wrong than to be interrupted by a balloon whenever something works as expected.

Of course, I long ago installed Growl on my desktop :)

It's not (necessarily) as intrusive as the old Windows notification balloons: you can control which apps generate Growl notifications. As with eye-grating page layouts in early desktop-publishing, or blinking text in early web pages, there's always the danger that you'll turn on all notifications because you can.

I do like the ease with which you can create custom Growl notifications for your own scripts/applications. T.ex. when I create a new timestamp in my VoodooPad worklog, Growl pops up a summary of times by task for the day. Were I not so lazy, I could ask it to notify me when long-running distributed compute jobs have finished; etc.

Anyway, it was funny to read the observations on O'Reilly Radar, written almost as though Growl were part of a standard OS X install.