Growl is an open, global, notification system for Mac OS X. What this means is that any app can plug into it in order to send status notifications that pop up on your screen.

Growl is an unobtrusive way to avoid the Pavlovian response to seeing the unread count in Mail go up in the Dock. Instead, you'll see a brief (configurable) popup that gives you a snippet of the mail message as it's received. Which means, if you're like me, you won't necessarily be interrupting your work to switch back and forth to and from Mail.

There are a ton of applications that plug into Growl to deliver various notifications, although the only other one that I really use is CyberDuck. Still, very highly recommended since it's both free and extremely useful.

Well, the March Break (Spring Break to our American cousins) is over. I managed to spend most of my time playing with the kids rather than getting much productive work done. Which I consider to be, generally, a Good Thing.

A few interesting items. Sensei George has passed on two links, one entertaining and one enlightening. The enlightening one first:

Firefox is better than Safari has made me re-examine my use of Safari on the Mac. I don't have any problems with Safari - I use it because it's conveniently located on my Dock, and I've felt no compelling reason to switch. There are, however, some compelling reasons outlined in the above article to switch to Firefox. Like saving complete web pages. More importantly though, with lots of folks on the Windows side using Firefox, lots of web sites are making sure their pages work with it. Which means that Mac users reap the benefits when they use Firefox themselves. Oh, and if you do use Firefox, try out the SessionSaver extension, which saves your complete browser state when you exit.

The entertaining one: Mac vs. PC 3 is a Photoshop contest. 'Nuff said.

Two things that I highly recommend as a result of recent personal experience:

Virtual PC 7 for Mac is so improved over VPC 6 it's absolutely worth the upgrade. Basically it's a whole lot faster, even if there's some cheating involved when you quit, where it does the session saving in the background while appearing to exit immediately. Oh well, it's all about perception and I perceive it to be faster.

If you need Mac memory, Mac Ram Direct is the place to order it. I've done it now three times with smooth inexpensive service. Bonus to Canadians, choose postal delivery and customs charges go to zero. Delivery time is about a week.

Finally, completely off topic, C.J. Cherryh's Destroyer is out in hardcover, and it's great.

Sensei George passes on a link to a good how-to article on building a home theater based on a PC. Specifically, one dedicated entirely to living-room use.

And this is probably the best advice if you decide you want to build (or buy) one of these - don't use it for anything else, or you won't end up using it as a media center. Certainly our Media Center PC is pretty much always in use by the kids for "other purposes", which precludes it's use for Media Center tasks.

The link:

Building Your Home Theater Around the PC (Tom's Hardware Guide)

I knew there was a reason I was feeling uncomfortable in the SoHo Apple Store a couple of weekends ago (other than the hordes of wannabes who seemed to feel that it was a good idea to "hang out" there, crowded around display systems doing their email, thereby preventing potential paying customers from checking out the hardware).

Here it is. One of these pictures was snapped by my lovely and talented wife while I waited in line to pay for a copy of Virtual PC 7, and the other is a shot of the Dawn of the Dead screen saver. Can you guess which is which?

Incidentally, if you enjoy the zombie genre, have a look at Monster Island, an excellent serialized, zombie e-novel that's also available for the iPod.

Update: the Monster Island iPod download page is now using the Apple-Store-Zombie picture for its background, if you weren't sure which picture was which :-)

This looks like one of those things that might make your Pocket PC more appealing to carry around. Mean Hamster Software has released Myst for the Pocket PC, at a cost of $24.95. There're screen shots at the link, but sadly no system requirements (at least, that I could find) or a demo version.

This was, years ago, my favorite game. I think I've forgotten enough about it to play it again :-)

(Via PDABuzz.com.)

This is cute - Bumptunes uses the new Powerbooks Mobile/Sudden Motion Sensor to let you advance to the next track in iTunes. I'd rather, say, click the mouse or press a key than jostle my $2500 Powerbook, but it's still a neat hack.

(Via iPod Hacks.)