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How do you use growl? Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
How do you use it? How do you have it set up? It's not a part of my trusted system yet. I have it installed and set up (because I needed it for one of Curt's scripts) but I pretty much ignore it.

Since we've got this nice new "Applying OF" forum, and I've seen a couple people mention it lately, how does it fit into your OF workflow?
 
I changed the growl settings (in the growl preferences pane in System Preferences) so that notifications for Available, Due Soon, and Overdue stay on my screen indefinitely, and that clicking on them notifies OmniFocus. I also changed to a display style (Crystal) that puts up smallish rectangles, sort of like little Post-It notes. Now as things become available for action (or require immediate action) I get a notification, and if it is something quick, I can do it and click on the OF icon in the notification to go directly to the item in OF and mark it off. I make extensive use of start dates/times and repeating actions and this works well for driving execution for me.
 
Oooh, goody gumdrops, I want to know this, too! Growlers ... report!
 
I just looked behind the "Configure" options for OF, and discovered all this ... configurability.

Had no idea that was there. Hadn't really looked carefully before!
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
I changed the growl settings (in the growl preferences pane in System Preferences) so that notifications for Available, Due Soon, and Overdue stay on my screen indefinitely, and that clicking on them notifies OmniFocus...


...as things become available for action (or require immediate action) I get a notification, and if it is something quick, I can do it and click on the OF icon in the notification to go directly to the item in OF and mark it off.

I hadn't realized that clicking the growl 'alert' in different ways/places (potentially) had different results depending on your settings. I thought the only clickable part of it was the 'close button'. After reading your post and tinkering a bit I've figured out that when you click the body of the alert, it will (potentially) take you to a new OF window with the action or project in question selected. I believe that what prompts this is the somewhat generic checkbox "Inform OF when a notification is clicked." Is that correct? So if that is not checked, when you click on the alert, nothing happens other than the alert disappearing. But if that box is checked, it opens a new OF window as described. It doesn't, under any configuration, actually check off your action (etc.) in OF. Right?

Thanks for taking the time to post how you use it. I've been wanting to utilize it more, but it's nice to not to have to start from scratch.
 
Yes, the "Inform OmniFocus" checkbox does need to be checked (at the time the notification was posted, I think) to get the handy link back to the action/project. I don't remember checking that box, but it's been a while... And no, it won't automatically check the item off for you, but at least in my case, I'm often going to reschedule the item rather than complete it if the notification comes up at an inconvenient time.

I don't know of any other nifty Growl tricks, but finding that one sure made my day! If you get swamped by the notifications, you can hold down the option key while clicking the close button on one to get rid of them all. Unfortunately, you can't easily put them back up! Also, if you have to quit OmniFocus for some reason, when you start it up again, the notifications seem to lose their links.

Working in this fashion does tend to cause a certain amount of window proliferation, and I'm getting some use out of the "Close Excess Windows" script I cobbled together in response to a forum post the other day!
 
It's only been a day, but I'm finding the notifications surprisingly unobtrusive. I find that I'm quite willing to let them sit there, perhaps because they are easily dismissed should I need to (in contrast, say, to MacSpeech Dictate's rude speech recognition window, which is about the same size and yet not so easily dismissed).

Pretty sure this innovation will stick. Definitely a nice discovery -- "made my day" too!
 
One nice thing about the notifications is that they take you to the action/project in Project mode, so if the thing you are doing is the last item in an action group or project, you can see that right away.
 
 


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