About

Welcome to Snarl

This graphic just about sums it up really!

Snarl is a notification system inspired by Growl for Macintosh that lets applications display fancy messages on the screen with the minimum of fuss - no complex code, libraries or other middleware required.

Unlike other forms of Windows notification, Snarl does not hijack the current focused window, nor does it force the taskbar to be visible. Notifications can either be cancelled by clicking on them, or left to disappear automatically if ignored for a period of time. Messages are extensible too: Snarl will notify the application which displayed the message if the user clicks it.

Probably best of all is that Snarl can display several messages at any one time; new messages are simply displayed alongside existing ones.

An application can display any number of messages, and can update the content, icon, and time the message appears for of any particular message at any time and explicitly remove the message if required.

If you're a developer of an application you can include Snarl support in your application with almost no effort at all - Snarl uses Windows window messaging functionality to show and hide notifications, making it accessible to any programming language from low-level pure C to high-level Visual Basic 6 or .net-based environments (and everything in between) and there is sample code for most languages available too.

You can also display Snarl messages using a command line tool and there's even a Python API available. There are no licence requirements; your app does not have to be Open Source and we don't expect any form of payment from you either - although a donation would be nice...

Snarl also supports small modules called extensions. These run within the Snarl process space and can be used to add Snarl functionality to existing applications without the need to modify the application itself. A number of handy extensions are included with Snarl and you can find more here.

Finally - we need your help! Snarl is nothing without application support so if your favourite IM client, Web Browser, Mail app, or whatever doesn't support Snarl then write to the developers asking for them to add support for Snarl. You could email them a link to the developer page which will tell them all about how to do this.