Hiss Pipes Growl Alerts To Mountain Lion Notification Center

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Hiss integrates Growl into Notification Center on OX X 10.8
Hiss integrates Growl into Notification Center on OX X 10.8

If you went ahead and loaded the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion onto your Mac, you likely already played around with the new Notification Center. Until you got bored and fired up Growl once again so you could enjoy notifications from all your apps, not just Mail and Calendar. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if all those Growl-capable apps could talk to Notification Center instead? With Hiss, they can.

Hiss is a free beta app for the beta OS which replaces Growl, and acts as a conduit to send Growl notifications to the new Notification Center instead. Growl, if you’re not familiar with it, is a system wide and open-source notification system which most apps support. In this way it is kind of like a Dropbox for alerts.

Hiss comes from Australian software developer Collect 3 (notable for the beautiful iOS RSS and Twitter client Spout). Download it, fire it up and quit Growl. Now, when compatible apps send their alerts to Growl, they instead pop up in Notification Center. They even get badged with Growl’s weird little monster-paw icon.

It just works, which is all you want from an alerts app. There are a few oddities. The app flashed a warning telling me to stop Growl for it to work, but it seems to run fine with Growl running or not. Also, Hiss doesn’t yet support the finer-grained, per-app controls provided by Growl. Still, it’s pretty great for a v0.1 release.

The app seems to have disappeared from the Collect 3 site right now (I downloaded it a half hour ago) and Twitter speculation is going crazy. I’ll update this post if and when it reappears.

[UPDATE: It’s back!]

[Via Macstories]

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