Snarl comes with a raft of styles so you can get customising right from the go. Featured here are First Person Shooter, News Ticker and Smooth 2.0 – all of which will ship with Snarl 2.6.
Snarl supports two primary types of style – Display and Redirect. Prior to R2.6, there was little distinction made between the two types; however the difference was significant. R2.6 introduces a more structured approach to the way the different types of style are presented, even though behind the scenes nothing has changed. All styles are provided by Style Engines – object libraries which are loaded into Snarl’s address space. Some style engines provide straightforward managed styles, however some style engines provide their own APIs which allow the end user to quickly and easily create a style. The EZ Style Engine allows for creation of relatively complex styles using nothing more than INI-style text files; while the Scripted Style Engine (which ships with R2.6) allows for incredibly complex styles to be created using VBScript.
Display styles – as the name suggests – generate content which is displayed on-screen; Redirect styles are even more powerful however, as they can send the notification content literally anywhere – as spoken content, down a serial port, over the Internet to a web service such as Prowl or Boxcar, to a printer, fax, as an email or text message – the options really are endless! What’s even more impressive is that Snarl 2.6 allows you to assign any number of Redirects you like, and each Redirect is triggered based on your current presence.
