Introduction

Many desktop applications running on Mac OS make use of Growl, a centralised notification system. Growl provides a set of functions that applications can call whenever they want to display a notification to the user, and since the user is able to configure how each message is displayed--including suppressing it altogether--the user gains control over the notifications that they'll receive from an application.

Yowl aims to make the same functionality available to web applications, via various sets of interfaces. There are two key design principles at the heart of Yowl; the first is that Yowl will make use of different functionality as it is available on different systems, such as speech, a full version of Growl, the Sidewinder system tray module, speech via Microsoft Agent and so on. If the user hasn't installed any enhanced features then Yowl will still display notifications using YUI. This means that the author doesn't need to know what is installed on their end-users' systems.

The second design principle is that a user's settings are stored 'in the cloud', and they can take their settings from one computer to another, independent of the application that they are using (an approach we call skimming).

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• ProjectRequirements
• UsingYowl
• DisplayStyleSystray
• DisplayStyleMSAgent
• About skimming on formsPlayer.com
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