The initial release of OmniGrowl version 4.3.4 was inadvertently Intel-only. Thanks to a user e-mail, this was corrected within a few hours. If you have a PPC, please re-download the universal version. Thanks.

In a few short months, Phone Amego has gone from a great idea with a lot of potential to a very solid, full-featured telephony application which mostly realizes that potential. This one simple menu bar application combines features of several other phone-related applications.

It will notify you of incoming calls (with Growl or its internal notification system). You can broadcast incoming Caller ID information over your local network, so every Mac in your house can see who is calling. If you use BoxCar or Prowl with Growl, you can send incoming land line call notifications to your iPhone.

Phone Amego also dials outgoing calls through land lines plugged into a USB modem, bluetooth cell phones (including an iPhone), Google Voice, and VoIP devices. You can even dial a land line attached to one computer from another computer on your local network. It handles numbers in your Address Book intelligently, including "plus-dial" international numbers and local numbers without area codes.

The developer is extremely responsive to suggestions and fixes problems and bugs nearly as quickly as you can throw at him (and I've thrown a lot at him over the past few months).

The chief remaining issues with Phone Amego have to do with a somewhat disjointed interface that makes initial set-up a bit tricky. But this itself is mainly the result of rapid feature expansion. It just got too big for its britches. I'd expect that eventually that will get cleaned up as well.

The download link as of 3PM EST on 10/19 yields the last version, 1.43. There is no mention of version 1.5 on the dev's web site or forum announcements.

I love it how every release says:

"Version 11.4.2 update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code."

lots of holes to plug i guess.

This works great for what it claims it does. I find it hysterical that it's made by Freeverse, the same culprits that make major game distractions that are to blame for untold months (in total) of mucking about. Now then, this would be ideal if it took over CMD-Tab from the system to switch apps, and/or if there were a global hotkey to activate it, and/or you could use the keyboard to switch apps. There seems to be a minor glitch with two monitors: sometimes it dims only one until you switch to it and mess with its controls.