The other day I wrote an app called dejour to give me growl notifications from all the *jour gems out there. I used Eric Hodel’s awesome ruby-growl library. Unfortunately it does all communications over the interweb, so you have to tweak some knobs in Growl to get it to work. I stumbled across a ruby/cocoa example using Growl, fixed it up, and released a gem called “Meow”.

Meow lets you post notifications to your local machine without adjusting Growl. If you’re on OS X 10.5, just do: $ gem install meow ~~~

Then you can do this: $ ruby -r rubygems -e'require "meow"; Meow.notify("meow", "meow", "meow")' ~~~

No growl tweaks required! Here is a code sample that is a little more explanatory:

require 'rubygems'
require 'meow'

meep = Meow.new('My Application Name')
meep.notify('Message Title', 'Message Description')

Be sure to check out the documentation.