Hiss for OS X Mountain Lion integrates Growl into Notification Center

The developer preview of Apple’s Mountain Lion has only been publicly available for 4 days now and already we’re seeing a useful third-party app come to the fledgling OS. Developer Collect3 has released Hiss, a free app that sends Growl notifications directly to Apple’s new Notification Center. Growl has long been the standard for OS X notifications, and there’s a vast catalog of software that supports the app’s notification system. We’ve given the app a quick test drive and it works just as it should, pulling in notifications from Growl-enabled apps like Sparrow and Adium and placing them alongside Apple’s Messages and Calendar notifications.

The only downsides of the app we’ve found so far are the lack of forwarding options — it would be useful to keep some apps outside of Notification Center — and that all the notifications are reported as coming from a single app, whereas Apple’s apps are all organized into separate sections. Both features are said to be on the way, and should come in an update due in the coming weeks.