There are a few utilities that don’t come as standard on your Mac which should. Growl falls into that category. We’ve mentioned it before on Macstarter, and it’s one of those things you install that you didn’t think you needed until you see it up and running.

For the uninitiated, growl does one job brilliantly. It simply posts little windows in the corner of your screen to tell you things as they happen. It can notify you when a download has finished, or when a software has an update available for download. It comes in a range of themes and you can fine tune where the notifications appear and for how long.

The latest version of Growl has now seen a move to the Mac App Store and I suppose most reviewers have latched onto the fact that it has moved from being free to costing just a couple of dollars (or euros). This new version does everything that the old version did, but now with a few added features. The one that I’m most interested in is the fact that you can now check over notifications that may have popped up on the screen while you were away from your screen, called rollup. You can even install Prowl on your iPhone or iPad and get your Mac’s notifications delivered to your mobile device.

Growl is one of the first apps I install on a Mac, and personally can’t live without it. I for one don’t have any problem paying for this great utility that used to be free, especially when it does such a brilliant job.