Sending Growl notifications from Dashboard widgets

14 March 2009 · Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Recently, on Dashboard-Dev, Aaron Vizzini asked how to integrate Growl notifications into Dashboard widgets. I just did this in Hurler and tr.im.it, so I am happy to document the process here.

Growl, if you’re not familiar, is a notification system for Mac OS X. It allows any application to notify you when it has, for example, finished uploading a file or changed the currently playing music track. Growl supports AppleScript, and that’s all it takes to know we can use it within Dashboard.

My use case was that users of my URL shortening widgets wanted to be able to exit Dashboard and be notified when the URL had been shortened and copied to the pasteboard. I didn’t think of this initially because the process is quite fast, but Hurler user Barry Briggs contacted me on Twitter and asked for it because he happens to run about a gazillion virtual machines at a time which slows his system down quite a bit. A day later, Hurler (and tr.im.it) had Growl support.

Note: the code I share below isn’t exactly what you’ll find if you explore the current versions of my widgets. I have generalized the code to make it more immediately useful to other widget authors. It’s all tested, though, and this code will go out in their next releases.

Here’s an overview of what I’m about to show you.

1. Some JavaScript that checks for the presence of Growl, then executes the notification command
2. The shell script I use to check for the presence of Growl
3. The AppleScript I use to compose and send the notification

First, the JavaScript.

widget.system('growl-enabled.sh', function (obj) {
   var cmd;
   if (+obj.outputString > 0) {
      cmd = '/usr/bin/osascript growl-notify.scpt ' +
         '"URL shortened" "Hurler Widget" "Dashboard" ' +
         '"http://hurl.ws/1bgq" "The URL has been shortened."';
      widget.system(cmd, function (obj) {});
   }
});

This script makes a widget.system call, running the growl-enabled.sh shell script. When the shell script returns, it’s value is passed into the anonymous callback function.

The shell script is quite simple. It invokes the command-line utility osascript and runs a simple AppleScript asking for a count of the number of processes named "GrowlHelperApp". If Growl is enabled, the script returns a 1. Otherwise, the script returns a 0.

#!/bin/sh
osascript<<END
tell application "System Events"
   return count of (every process whose name is "GrowlHelperApp")
end tell
END

If Growl is enabled, the JavaScript goes on to compose the command that will make the Growl notification happen. The command consists of calling osascript and passing it the following 6 parameters, in order:

growl-notify.scpt

The path to the Growl notification AppleScript

"URL shortened"

The notification name

"Hurler Widget"

The name of the application requesting the notification

"Dashboard"

The name of the application whose icon we will show in the notification

"http://hurl.ws/1bgq"

The title of the notification (in this case, the result of the URL shortening call)

"The URL has been shortened."

The notification description

osascript runs growl-notify.scpt and passes the other parameters to it. The AppleScript to make the notification request is as follows:

on run argv
   tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
      set the allNotificationsList to {item 1 of argv}
      set the enabledNotificationsList to {item 1 of argv}
      register as application ¬
         item 2 of argv all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
         default notifications enabledNotificationsList ¬
         icon of application item 3 of argv
      notify with name ¬
         item 1 of argv title item 4 of argv ¬
         description ¬
         item 5 of argv application name item 2 of argv
   end tell
end run

I won’t explain this in too much detail as AppleScript is fairly self-explanatory and this script is largely lifted from the Growl documentation, where it is explained in detail. I will point out that on run argv sets up an array of the arguments passed to the script, which are then accessed by asking for item 1 of argv ("URL shortened"), item 2 of argv ("Hurler Widget"), and so on.

Download growl-notify.scpt

That’s it. I hope this is helpful. Happy Growling!