Snarl

The Growl-inspired tool Snarl is truly an impressive piece of software. This application notifies you when various events happen. This means you will get a notification when you receive an IM, when you run out of free space on a drive, when a new email makes it to your Gmail inbox, when a file is renamed, and more. The application will ensure that you never miss any important event – but it won’t notify you in an intrusive, annoying manner.

Little time and effort will go into installing Snarl on your Windows-powered machine. It is, in all fairness, a standard 3-step setup process: download an executable (a 7.9MB one in this case), run the executable, click through the instructions presented by a setup wizard. Anyone who has ever installed a Windows application in the past should have no problems installing this one.

While Snarl is running, you will notice two icons in the system tray: one for the application itself and one for the TMinus countdown feature. Double click the Snarl icon and the Preferences window will show up – from this window you can see which applications are registered with Snarl, change the look and behavior of the notifications, set up forwarding rules, and more.

As the developer put it, when stuff happens, Snarl will notify you. The nice thing about this bit of functionality is that Snarl supports many applications and numerous applications natively support Snarl. This means that Snarl will work right out of the box – install the application and it will start notifying you. For applications that do not support Snarl natively, there are addons or plugins that fix the problem.

The notifications Snarl presents are, by default, displayed in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. There are several customization options you can take advantage of. You can change the look of the notifications, you can change the placement of the notifications, you can change the behavior of the notifications, you can choose to receive audio notifications, and you can choose to forward notifications. You can set it up so that notifications will be sent out as an email, pushed to a notifications service, posted to Facebook, forwarded as a tweet, or displayed on an external visual device.

As it is released under a GNU General Public License, Snarl is a free application. You can enjoy the functionality it has to offer for as long as you want and you won’t have to part with your hard earned money in the process.

Snarl is a properly good notification system. It provides support for many applications, it delivers good looking notifications, it can forward those notifications, and it is free.