I think one of the nicest things about OS X is the ability for applications to hook into the Growl notification system in order to display their updates.
Freeow is a jQuery plugin that allows you to create a similar experience within the context of your website or web applications.
The plugin has a clean implementation so it’s really easy to get started using it in your project.
After including it in the header of your page, do the following:
Setup the element that you want to contain the notification and give it the ID of freeow:
[cc lang=”html”]
[/cc]
Next, include a call to the plugin including the information you want to displayed within the notification. Here’s a simple example:
[cc lang=”javascript”]
$(“#freeow”).freeow(“The 8BIT Network”, “We’ve just published a few posts about @dewde’s hair.”);
[/cc]
You can check out more examples including a tool for the various ways to use it on the project homepage.
Justin says
I like this because I can see some cases where it would be handy, but it’s also one of those features I fear too many people will think is “neat” and then proceed to misuse it.
Tom McFarlin says
Yeah – hopefully the fact that there’s a minimal amount of JavaScript to get the thing working helps raise the threshold a bit.