autotest-fsevent teaches autotest a new trick: using FSEvent (provided in Mac OS X 10.5.x) instead of ordinary filesystem polling.  This means less CPU usage because FSEvent broadcasts filesystem changes, making active and periodic polling unnecessary.

autotest-growl enhances the Growl support that autotest comes with by adding support for Growling results for tests (using Test::Unit), specs (using RSpec), and features (using Cucumber) and adding pretty Ruby logos to the notifications.

If you use Mac OS X and autotest, I highly recommend that you try these gems out today:

sudo gem install autotest-fsevent
sudo gem install autotest-growl

One caveat: if you’re using ZenTest 4.0.0 or older, you need to do a bit of trickery to get autotest-growl to work properly.  These versions of ZenTest come with their own autotest Growl plugin, so you need to make sure you’re requiring the Growl support from autotest-growl instead of ZenTest’s own. Here’s what I ended up writing in my ~/.autotest file:

require '/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/autotest-growl-0.1.0/lib/autotest/growl.rb'