by OS X Mountain Lion’s iOS-inspired Notification Center feature lets applications alert you to important events. But there’s more Notification Center could do—with the right apps. For example, if you’ve installed Growl and the excellent HardwareGrowler (Mac App Store link), you can get notifications for things such as peripheral connections and disconnections.
Notifi (Mac App Store link) looks to leverage Notification Center similarly. Like HardwareGrowler, Notifi is a small app that does nothing on its own; rather, it watches your Mac for particular events and then uses Notification Center to alert you to those events.
Using Notifi’s preferences window, you can choose which types of events you want notifications for. Enable the Devices Added/Removed option, and you’ll be notified whenever a volume is mounted or unmounted. (Unlike with HardwareGrowler, Notifi doesn’t watch for all peripheral connections and disconnections—just the mounting and unmounting of volumes.) When a volume is mounted, the notification you see includes information about the size of the drive and how much of that space is currently filled. When a drive is unmounted, you see when it’s safe to unplug.
Examples of Notifi notifications
The Disk Space settings let you set free-space thresholds for up to four volumes. When a particular volume’s free space dips below its threshold, Notifi notifies you. Unfortunately, Notifi is overzealous here: If you dismiss a low-drive-space warning, it quickly reappears. The only way to stop the warning from appearing is to free up some space on the drive (something you may not be able to do immediately) or disable the Disk Space option for that drive.
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