Any Apple fanboy or fangirl is sure to be familiar with Growl.  For those of you who aren’t, Growl is system for posting notifications to the computer’s user.  Growl uses a unique set of features to unobtrusively notify the user.  It does so in the foreground, so you don’t have to do anything to see them and they usually disappear after a few seconds.  The iPhone lacks any sort of informative notification system.

There’s hope that with the upcoming 3.0 iPhone software something will address the need, but for now there’s GriP.  GriP – which is for Jailbroken phones only – was recently posted at Google Code, and it is now available through Cydia. GriP seeks to do on the iPhone, what Growl does for the Mac desktop .

I’ve been testing GriP for the last few days and am finding it works quite well.  When a new mail message comes in, a little pop up box appears on the screen.  You can set the location of the pop up box in the GriP settings.

The box shows the number of new messages received.  For more information on the notification, you press the down arrow.  If you choose the X, the notification is then dismissed.

If you choose the down arrow you’ll see the e-mail address of the sender.

You then can scroll down further to see the subject of the message.

If you tap in the center of the notification the mail application is opened.  Right now I’ve only tested GriP with the mail application.

In GriP’s settings you can configure how long the notifications stay visible, when they show up and for what applications, where the notification is shown, and more.

GriP also includes a feature that warns you when your system memory is running low.  You can configure when it notifies you via the settings menu as well.

GriP is still in beta, so it’s not without bugs, but that’s to be expected.  I’ve had a few springboard crashes, but nothing that’s impossible to live with.

More informaton on GriP can be found on the Google Code page.

Related posts:

1. Prowl – the way push e-mail on the iPhone should be
2. GPush for iPhone brings push Gmail – sorta
3. Facebook For iPhone Update. Now With Push Notifications
4. iPhone 2.2: Why isn’t anyone talking about push notifications?
5. What’s App Messenger for iPhone