I couldn’t get growlnotify to work reliably on my Snow Leopard. And some of Growl’s preference panes are absurd. And Growl insists on growling at you every time it auto-updates itself, with no way to turn that off. My friend Darius dislikes it, too.
I’ll tell you what I do even though it is far from ideal.
I have the program play a sound file to notify me. Sound is not the best way for a program to notify me because I have a habit of taking off my headphones, but leaving them plugged in.
After you install the free app “Adium” you can find some nice chimes in /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds/
I use the following command line to play a chime:
open -a VLC /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds//TokyoTrainStation.AdiumSoundset/Contact_On.m4a
Of course this presupposes you have VLC installed. And the first time I play a chime, there’s a delay of a few seconds while VLC loads the chime.
ADDED. I also use a visual signal as follows. In the “Hearing” tab on the Universal Access system pref pane, I check the box “Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs”. I use the Emacs function DING to generate the aforementioned alert sound. Sorry, I do not know how to generate an alert sound from the shell.
I couldn’t get growlnotify to work reliably on my Snow Leopard. And some of Growl’s preference panes are absurd. And Growl insists on growling at you every time it auto-updates itself, with no way to turn that off. My friend Darius dislikes it, too.
Is there a better alternative?
I’ll tell you what I do even though it is far from ideal.
I have the program play a sound file to notify me. Sound is not the best way for a program to notify me because I have a habit of taking off my headphones, but leaving them plugged in.
After you install the free app “Adium” you can find some nice chimes in /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds/
I use the following command line to play a chime:
open -a VLC /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Sounds//TokyoTrainStation.AdiumSoundset/Contact_On.m4a
Of course this presupposes you have VLC installed. And the first time I play a chime, there’s a delay of a few seconds while VLC loads the chime.
ADDED. I also use a visual signal as follows. In the “Hearing” tab on the Universal Access system pref pane, I check the box “Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs”. I use the Emacs function DING to generate the aforementioned alert sound. Sorry, I do not know how to generate an alert sound from the shell.
why not use mplayer for the sound?
These days I use /usr/bin/afplay. The advantages are (1) lightweight program that loads quickly, (2) installed by default on all Macs.