The framework AppleScriptObjC allows users to write scripts with an interesting fusion of the AppleScript and Objective-C languages. Specifically, Apple describes the framework as:

AppleScriptObjC lets AppleScript objects serve as Objective-C objects in the Cocoa runtime

Basically this means that you can use simplistic Objective-C code in an AppleScript with the seemingly easier to grasp syntax of AppleScript. If none of this makes any sense yet then just hang in there and I will explain in a very visual tutorial in which I will build a sample Cocoa-AppleScript app that simply sends a notification to the Notification Center and quits.

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Notifications have been a part of iOS from day one, and last year’s iOS 5 update improved them greatly with Notification Center and the new banner style (the one that rolls down from the top of the screen without disrupting your current activity). They are an integral part of our interactions with our iPhones and iPads — we get them from missed calls, text messages, emails, reminders, social network interactions, apps, games, and so on. But on the Mac, notifications have been more of a hack than a system-level feature: something that developers have implemented themselves, and mostly just when they felt it was absolutely necessary to do so. As a result, they haven’t been nearly as much a part of the OS X experience as they have on iOS.

The most widely-used system for notifications on OS X until now has been Growl: a third-party app that allowed developers to easily implement their own notifications. It was widely adopted by the OS X developer community, and over the years it became an essential install for many Mac users. But Growl isn’t the best solution for notifications because it is still a third party app that the user must go out of their way to install.[1] Whilst this isn’t a problem for an experienced computer user, it is for those that don’t want or need to worry about finding a download link for a third-party notification solution or keeping it up to date (though admittedly this has become less of a problem with Growl’s release on the Mac App Store). And of course Apple itself would never use Growl for notifications for their own apps, some of which could benefit most from notifications (e.g. Mail, Messages, and FaceTime).

Fortunately, in OS X Mountain Lion Apple has now implemented native notifications and Notification Center. If you’ve ever used iOS 5 you’ll instantly be familiar with how they work because Apple has effectively recreated them for the Mac, only making a few changes to suit the different platform. All of Apple’s built-in OS X applications support the new notifications (Messages, Mail, Reminders, Mac App Store, FaceTime, etc) and there is an API for developers to add support for them to their own as well.

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As noted by MacRumors earlier today, Apple appears to be testing a new browser-based notification system for iCloud.com. Judging from the screenshot that clearly shows a testing environment being accidentally brought to a user’s attention, the system appears to be similar in terms of design to what Apple introduced with iOS 5 last year.

While it’s not clear whether Apple may be planning to revamp iCloud.com completely to include notifications or if today’s spotted banner is the sign of something else, with WWDC ’12 approaching I thought it might be interesting to run down some possible implementations.

iCloud.com is an option, and not a central part of the experience Apple is envisioning with iCloud and devices going forward. Mobile devices and computers are integrated with iCloud in a way that iCloud itself becomes the operating system. The browser-based, neatly-designed iCloud.com is a way to access some of iCloud’s content through the open web (as long as you have a modern browser). While not fundamental to the experience, I believe there are some additions Apple could make to improve iCloud.com and turn it into a viable substitute to native iCloud interfaces. Specifically, web notifications could play very well in various scenarios.

iMessage on the web: The first beta of Messages for OS X left many disappointed, and an iMessage web app could obviate the need of a unified iChat/iMessage desktop app, while providing a great solution for browser notifications.

Email and calendar alerts: An obvious one, yet a possibly great system to receive notifications while browsing other sections of iCloud.com.

App-free notifications: Assuming Apple is really testing notifications for iCloud.com, I’d be interested in knowing whether their idea is to display notifications exclusively on iCloud.com while open. In fact, while I always forget to visit iCloud.com on my Mac, a notification system for (not from) iCloud.com would be perfect to remind me to visit and use the web app. I don’t think this is going to happen, as I see such system being more a way to simply display alerts inside iCloud.com.

Jump-to-section: And if such system is being built to notify users of changes while on iCloud.com, I would expect to be able to click on a notification, and have iCloud automatically open the associated section of the site.

Document changes: Right now, we don’t know why Apple is building a notification system for iCloud.com. We don’t even know whether the “leaked” banner could be linked to a future public feature, or an internal use-only functionality. However, it would be nice if a notification system for iCloud.com could inform users of changes to documents stored on iCloud.com. This plays well with the next point…

Sharing and collaborative features: Apple is discontinuing iWork.com, and the company hasn’t announced any plans for a possible revamped sharing system for documents. iCloud.com notifications could inform users of changes to a document edited by someone else, and they wouldn’t necessarily require a web-based editing interface to go with (though a Google Docs-like solution for iCloud users would be an amazing addition to my workflow).

Find My iPhone and Find My Friends: Notifications could tell users about a found device, or a family member nearby, though I assume those would only be a nice extra compared to the functionality already enabled in the respective native apps.

Game Center: Apple’s social gaming service is getting a dedicated app with Mountain Lion, but for the sake of options, iCloud.com could gain a web counterpart — with notifications to stay on top of friend requests and more.

Twitter: on iOS 5, users can configure their Twitter accounts at a system level to tweet and log into other apps. On Mountain Lion, desktop users will enjoy support for Twitter notifications directly into Notification Center. It would be nice if everyone else got nice little banners for Twitter replies and DMs on iCloud.com — clicking on them could take you directly to Twitter’s website, and it would offer a way to stay on top of Twitter even when using iCloud.com.

Presence: I have written about this idea in my iOS 6 wish list. If Apple is extending notifications to iCloud.com, the issue of notification overload could potentially increase again. Regardless of what kind of notifications for iCloud.com Apple is working on, there should be a way for iCloud to understand whether you are actively using an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or web browser.

Wildcard: App updates: This is my wildcard, and I do hope Apple will consider such functionality someday. Right now, I use AppShopper to get notifications for updates to the apps I already own. With complete access to my purchase history and iTunes on the desktop, Apple could easily notify my iCloud account of updates available on the App Store, and provide an easy way to click through and start a download.

Once again when it comes to iCloud, I’m just speculating on the direction Apple may be taking with its cloud service, admittedly the most promising platform the company is building for the next decade. Having thrown my two cents at this other side of the discussion, I look forward to seeing whether today’s alleged notification system will materialize in a finished product on June 11.

Since Apple released a public beta of Messages for Mac, we’ve been having a bit of a notification overload here at MacStories HQ. See, ever since iMessage was released with iOS 5, we’ve had our own group message with everyone on the MacStories team — it was a portable water cooler, where we could chat about random things, share silly pictures and even co-ordinate things for the site, even when we were out and about. We used it quite frequently, but things turned for the worse last week when we all got that Messages for Mac beta. What might have been 10 messages in a given time period, suddenly morphed into 50 messages because of the convenience of having iMessage just a click way on our Macs. Things were becoming chaotic and quite distracting, Don had even turned off vibrations — meaning he got no notification for any message, from anyone.

We didn’t want to give up on using Messages for Mac, and it was probably going to be a hard task to change our messaging behaviours to limit the number of messages sent, but it was clear this week that we had to do something.

Fortunately, we think we have found a solution. In iOS, Apple includes the ability to change the text tone and ringtone on a per-contact basis. What we did for everyone in the MacStories team, was to change the text tone to “None”. You can do this by going into the Contacts app, selecting a contact and tapping the ‘Edit’ button and scrolling to “text tone”.

This now means regardless of whether your phone is on Silent or not, you will not get any noise or vibration to alert you to the new message. There are two downsides to this ‘workaround’: the first is that you will still get the notification bar flipping down from the top of your screen. The second problem, which could be a deal breaker for some, is that any messages from that person will not cause a vibration or text tone — important to remember if they are a participant in a few of your group message threads.

There should be another way…

Whilst the ability to change the text tone (and ringtone) on a per-contact basis is really cool (and can be used for a number of other purposes), perhaps there should be another way to control message notifications differently — especially now that iMessage is bundled in iChat, and may lead to an increased number of messages sent to iOS devices. Specifically I’m talking about muting specific message conversations. This would allow me to mute the message thread that has all of the MacStories members, but still receive notifications from Federico, in case he urgently wanted me to cover something.

Apple could easily implement the option inside the Messages app, simply displaying a mute icon next to each message thread when in the ‘Edit’ mode. Just like changing the text tone on a per-contact basis, this power-user option wouldn’t make the UI messy, because it would only appear in the ‘Edit’ screen. That way, users could choose between completely muting on a per-contact basis or on a per-message thread basis — all whilst still receiving notifications for your other messages.

Back in July, we reported the next version of Growl, a popular notification system for OS X, would be available exclusively on the Mac App Store as a paid app. The reason behind the choice to go Mac App Store-only at $1.99 was to provide users with an app up-to-date with Apple’s technologies and standards for software that can released on the Mac App Store. As we noted in our article, that meant the Growl team had to rewrite the app completely, and start contacting third-party developers — over the years, Growl has generated its own ecosystem of apps compatible with desktop notifications — to make sure their software would be compatible with Growl 1.3.

The new Growl is now available on the Mac App Store at $1.99. While we’ll have a detailed, in-depth review of the app later this week, it’s worth noting now that Growl has indeed made the transition to paid app, but it’s also sporting a whole new architecture, UI, notification list, and themes.

Growl 1.3 comes in a new app form that has a menubar icon to activate/pause notifications, and a new Preferences window to see notification history, supported apps, configure themes, and more. History can be customized to show only a certain amount of recent items and days, and you can even search past notifications and events. The new Growl comes with almost 20 themes pre-installed, and you can style an application’s overlay notifications (the ones that Growl will briefly display on screen) in Growl’s Preferences. You can also create and install your own themes with basic CSS/XHTML/Javascript language.

One of the biggest new features of Growl 1.3 is the Rollup window — from a first look, it appears to be Growl’s unofficial response to Apple’s Notification Center for iOS. Because Growl keeps working even while you’re away from your computer, the Rollup window will collect the notifications you’ve missed in a single place, allowing you to review them later. There’s also a new Network option that enables you to forward notifications to another Mac, or to receive them from another computer running Growl.

Other features mention in the App Store’s description:

• Speech display for hearing your notifications.
• Send Growl notifications from Cocoa, AppleScript, or over the network.
• Networking so that two or more Macs can forward notifications to each other.
• Can work with the iPhone and iPad via Prowl.

Growl 1.3 is available on the Mac App Store at $1.99. Make sure to check out the app’s new website and Screenshots page, whilst Developers can visit this links to learn more about Growl 1.3 and its technical changes. Looks for a full review of Growl 1.3 on MacStories soon.

Back in July I decided to take a look at Prowl, an iOS app and web service that takes notifications from Growl, the popular app for the Mac soon to receive a major update, and transforms them into push notifications for your iPhone. So say you’ve left Transmission downloading a large torent at home, when the download is complete and Growl displays a desktop notification for that, Prowl will grab that message, push it up to the cloud, and back down to your iOS device when you’re on the go. Prowl works with any app that’s supported by Growl, and I was impressed by the quantity and quality of third party apps based on the Prowl API when I spent my first weekend with the app.

An update to Prowl for iOS was released today, and as the developers had previously teased this new version adds native iPad support and a “do not disturb” feature to force quiet hours when enabled. If you don’t want your devices to wake you in the middle of the night, that’s certainly welcome. And whilst the iPad app looks fairly similar to its iPhone counterpart in terms of design, the main notification list has been tweaked to be more refined and smaller in size. Notifications can be collapsed and expanded, and the settings have been moved to app’s toolbar.

This release also includes the following bug fixes:

• Fixed quiet time setting the wrong time zone, thus being an hour off.
• Fixed not leaving edit mode when removing the last entry.
• Fixed some settings pages lacking titles.
• Fixed cropping of Prowl app icon.
• Fixed marking notifications as “new” even after backgrounding.
• Fixed some description text sizing problems.

Prowl 1.3 retains its underlying simplicity in both design and function while adding some useful options to control how notifications are displayed. Get it here at $2.99.