OmniGrowl extends Growl's notification for Mac operating system to also include useful information about events in your system and in your personal calendar. The program works well with iCal, therefore you will never miss on reminders of your events - they will be shown in the manner that won't interfere with the current project you're working on.
Growl itself is only useful 50 percent of the time. It gives you standard system notifications - a file was downloaded, a program quits and so on. With the extension Omni, the Growl is 100 percent useful: it can output useful information about the playing tracks in your iTunes, and what the weather's like outside - and that information is not permanently mounted on your desktop like it is with widgets and gadgets. This information is available when you need it and the way you want it.
If you check out the screenshots of the program below, you can see that it is highly customizable. There are tabs for almost everything you need - music, news, events (your iCal events), transport (flight delays), the state of your hard drive, quotes of the day, and even more. The only thing missing is this program's ability to come up with your own source of information, but in 99 percent of the cases, everything you need is already included in this extension.
I believe the price of 12 dollars is quite fair. And many of you will find Growl notifications to be a nice way to stay informed but not consumed by that information (you won't need to interrupt typing a letter, or pause your Skype conversations to press an OK button on a pop-up message) - a semi-transparent message comes, you acknowledge it, the message goes away. Can't think of a better way to be notified.
v4.3 [Mar 15, 2011]
Daily notifications for pending to-dos up to 60 days prior.
Add recently shown concerts or Upcoming events to iCal.
Fixed Pollstar concert notifications.
Added support for concert notifications from bandsintown.
Bandsintown supports a radius around your location.
Revamped and expanded holiday notifications.
More holiday greetings including those for some specific countries.
Also now includes holidays that fall on nth weekday of a month (Mother's Day, etc.)
Special advance reminders for Mother's Day and Father's Day (US only).
Holiday greetings can be turned off from within OmniGrowl.
Type of holiday greetings can be set according to "persuasion" for for U.S.
Holidays no longer shown again if OmniGrowl launched more than once on a holiday.
Added a few more major countries to the country popup menu.
Added holiday test function to Test tab.
Cleaned up Test tab.
Improved OED Word of the Day reliability and formatting.
Updated OED icons.
Improved GeekTool integration performance for image updages.
