Disable Growl Notifications
Growl is a desktop notification system that allows applications to publish updates and items to floating windows on your desktop. This allows you to see things like updates, information, and status changes to whatever application is publishing the Growl notification.
The advantage to Growl is that regardless of what application has the focus, you’ll see the published status update. This is also the disadvantage, there are many times when you are using an application and you simply don’t care to see updates from another application printing to your desktop. I find Growl updates to be of a particular nuisance when you are using a Mac with a smaller screen resolution, when display real estate is valuable any additional clutter can really get in the way.
With all this in mind, here are a few ways to disable Growl notifications, both on an application specific basis, and on a system wide basis by disabling Growl completely.
Disable Growl Notifications for specific applications
You can specify applications to disable Growl notifications for by using the Growl control panel, here’s how:
* Open System Preferenecs
* Click on the “Growl” icon
* Click on the Applications tab
* Select each application you want to disable Growl support for by unchecking the checkbox next to the application name.
In this screenshot example, Cyberduck, TextWrangler, and Transmit have had Growl support disabled but Facebook Notifier for Mac is still allowed to publish Growl notifications to the desktop.
* Once you have unchecked the ‘Enabled’ checkboxes next to the application names, close the Growl system prefs and your changes will take effect immediately for those applications.
Disable Growl Notifications completely
OK so you’ve determined that there is no app worthy of dumping status updates all over your desktop, I can relate. Here is how to completely disable Growl notifications from appearing on your Mac:
* Launch System Preferences
* Click on the Growl icon
* Under the ‘General’ tab, click on the ‘Stop Growl’ button
* Disable the ‘Start Growl at login’ item
* Close System Preferences, changes take effect immediately.
Now it doesn’t matter what application has Growl support, the notifications won’t popup on your desktop. If for whatever reason you want to leave Growl running but you don’t want to see any notifications, you can hide all the Growl notifications by going to the same menu as above, and instead of stopping Growl, just click the checkbox next to ‘Hide all notifications’. This leaves Growl running but you won’t see any of the status updates.