Growl

I can’t believe it took me this long to try out something that most everyone who has already tried has been praising so highly!

You know how it sucks that each and every application you have, and which needs to get your attention sometimes, has it’s own mechanism to do so?
I get annoyed by it constantly and I hate the lack of uniformity and especially the way some apps don’t allow me to configure the way I want it to talk to me.

What would be nice was for the system to provide a generic notification mechanism, with an open interface that all applications could use and which could be configured at the system level, both for the notification method and appearance but also for each individual application.

Well, Growl does just that! And even though it can be improved it already does a bang-up job.