Snarl is a notification app that can display notifications on-screen, spoken out loud, sent to your mobile phone, another computer, and more.

Snarl promises a very simple to use interface, but we don't agree entirely. Snarl is portable, but you'll need to run SnarlOSD-setup.exe before it works correctly. We expected a single, one screen interface but all we had was a taskbar icon leaving us shaking our head at first. The taskbar icon, when right-clicked, shows About, hide all or sticky notifications, do not disturb, appear away, console, stop Snarl, add-ons, settings, and quit. Most likely, you are looking for settings to get started.

Settings will open in your default web browser and here is where you will find numerous options for Rules, Apps, Services, Network, History, and Missed. And then there are settings. Inside of the settings. These include General, Presence, Notifications, On-Screen Display, Network, Security, and Admin. Weird.

Of course, by default, Snarl looks for existing applications to add to notifications and these can be customized.

As you add notifications keep in mind that it can slow your computer down. We're using an Intel i7, 32GB of ram and an SSD drive, so it takes a bit too slow this beast down. Still, keep that in mind.

We'll admit, Snarl is kinda cool. We think there's a bit of a learning curve and the claims that it's easy-to-use didn't bear out for us immediately. However, setting up notifications for just a dozen items, with all the possibilities, is a difficult task to simplify. That said, it's worth the effort.