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Originally Posted by Forrest
I like the idea of a download progress bar. Something like photoshop's progress bar on the dock icon.
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That'd be neat, although it might get complicated with with lots of downloads. That's why Growl seems like a good idea ...
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<mini rant>On a side note, I'm curious what others think about Growl. A while back someone had me try it out and said it was really cool and useful. I tried it and found it absolutely horrible. I was just reading through their site and some of the claims they make seem like bigger exaggerations than any politician has ever made. I've seen viruses on Windows that I would rather have.</mini rant>
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I think I've had Growl installed for quite some time, and I don't remember it been quite that horrible, but, then again, I never used it for much until recently. It's clearly still in development but does work. One of the biggest problems is less than stellar implementation of Growl in particular apps. It's a neat idea, and I think it's the kind of thing that Apple should be working on instead of things like iPhoto (not to incite any flames here, just to say that I wish they were developing the OS more rather than adding apps; I've never used iPhoto, simply commenting on what sorts of software should be part of the OS; then again, there are apps like Keynote, which I've started to use, that are much more pleasant to use than the M$ alternative).
There are uses for it that don't seem like good ideas to me (like RSS notifications—I'd hate to see fifty or a hundred little Growl windows line up every hour when NNW updates). But for little things like finished downloads or errors in programs in the background it works well. Instead of an app hopping in the dock asking for attention for a notification window, Growl just shows it and removes it, a window that you don't need to touch for it to disappear. (Incidentally, I nostalgically remember that After Dark would run notifications along the menubar while screensavers were on.)
Growl's also scriptable. So I've used it for a couple of scripts with LaunchBar and OnMyCommand for things like dictionary lookups or MD5 hashes.