With the prevalence of AJAX and background operations on the web these days it pays to have an unobtrusive method for notifying the user when certain things happen. Typically thise is done with an animated graphic, or a popup but these usually mean you have to make a choice between relaying information and being intrusive, or being minimal with information and being very passive.

Growl is an application that has become quite popular on the Mac, it allows applications to popup a notification sticky in the corner of the screen for a while. They’re very handy and unobtrusive and now someone has gone ahead and implemented a similar notification style using jQuery. He calls it jGrowl which makes sense.

I think I’ll be using it quite a bit in a few projects I’ve been working on recently. It seems like the best of both worlds and very easy to implement now that someone else has done the heavy lifting for me.