Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Growl in Retirement

336699.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 245 posts

Re: Growl in Retirement

#11

Post by perardi »

aroch wrote: post #7
perardi wrote: post #2

Pour one out for a fondly remembered enhancement to Mac OS X. In a somewhat similar nostalgic vein, I remember haxies… https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Haxie …and as linked in the blog post, Adium. https://adium.im Seemingly indispensable apps/applets/desk accessories that were either made unworkable by security changes, Sherlocking, or just the changing services we use. (Just look at those Adium services, and wistfully…

Oh Haxies, I remember writing run-time patches (aka, cracks) to bypass licensing/registration for several pieces of software. There was a common framework, whose name no eludes me, that could be almost universally patched giving access to tens (100s?) of software.

I can remember that too, and that will eat away at me for a bit, because that’s non-trivial to search for now.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#12

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #8
liquidise wrote: post #6

> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years. Apple folks: take note. These are r…

Don’t forget f.lux, now Night Shift.

I still use f.lux because I find Night Shift doesn't get red enough for me.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#13

Post by noitpmeder »

liquidise wrote: post #6

> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years. Apple folks: take note. These are r…

Similar things happened with most of the popular jailbreak utilities for iPhones. Custom backgrounds, app icons, ... really all of the successful modifications were eventually pulled into iOS.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#14

Post by perardi »

liquidise wrote: post #6

> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years. Apple folks: take note. These are r…

Do people get tweak-y with their systems as much any more?

I used to get extremely into customizing Mac OS (as in, Classic Mac OS), and early versions of OS X and iOS during the jailbreak salad days.

Now, not so much. I tend to run closer to stock, and not deal with the system constantly changing and deprecating my tweaks. Is that because I am old, or is it less common now? (Not a rhetorical question, I really don’t know.)

Re: Growl in Retirement

#15

Post by robenkleene »

postpawl wrote: post #9
liquidise wrote: post #6

> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years. Apple folks: take note. These are r…

The last few weeks have been non-stop rave reviews of the new Mac. I doubt they’re worried.

I’m not sure I’m following this comment, the vast majority of those Macs are being purchased to run macOS, and macOS is immeasurably better because of developers making things like Growl.

Note that Apple has dropped hints that they’d like users to move from macOS to iOS (“what’s a computer?”). Third party developers can’t build anything like Growl on iOS. There are a lot of reasons I don’t think Apple will ever be able to replace macOS with a closed system like iOS, but at least one of them is simply that a system as closed as iOS will inherently have a low ceiling for innovation (not enough room to innovate on the platform) therefore this innovation will be channeled into other platforms.

In other words, I think developers building features like Growl for macOS is highly relevant to the success of M1 Macs.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#16

Post by varenc »

liquidise wrote: post #6

> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years. Apple folks: take note. These are r…

How should Apple have handled this? Maybe insisted on acquiring the Growl company? I don't think Apple should have just avoided building Notification Center, since that's a big net benefit for everyone.

If an acquisition is rejected/infeasible/not applicable/etc, then I'm not clear on the right thing to do. Acquisition might have been possible with Growl, but for some other cases there's not even a company to acquire. Have any other big platforms done this well?

(Apple's acquisition of Workflow which became Shortcuts seems like a case where they did this well)

Re: Growl in Retirement

#17

Post by purplecats »

liquidise wrote: post #6

> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years. Apple folks: take note. These are r…

> Apple folks: take note. These are real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side. Shun them as you have in recent years and you might find another OS starts to benefit from their weekend projects and innovative ideas.

I've recently come to a shift on mentality and believe that such sentiments are meaningless. It's almost always the most parasitic and immoral of the players that succeed and continue to succeed. The worse they can treat the other parties, generally the better off they are. It's like a deer telling a lion it should consider eating more grass.

Yeah it sucks cause we're generally in the camp that is being taken advantage of. But due to the forces of capitalism and human nature, you can practically mathematically prove that your words will not be heeded, and to great great profit.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#18

Post by jchook »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #12
TechBro8615 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget f.lux, now Night Shift.

I still use f.lux because I find Night Shift doesn't get red enough for me.

On MacOS I found serious performance issues with f.lux and now I happily use redshift[1] without ever thinking about it.

1. http://jonls.dk/redshift/

Re: Growl in Retirement

#19

Post by cytzol »

liquidise wrote: post #6

> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years. Apple folks: take note. These are r…

> These are real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side.

I think it actually goes a little further. Growl is (was) a fantastic notifications system, but it wouldn't have succeeded without the healthy ecosystem of third-party programs that were willing to use it. When I installed it, long long ago, everything I wanted notifications from suddenly supported them. If the developers hadn't been talking to each other, it wouldn't have worked.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#20

Post by grogenaut »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #3

This illustrates how in proprietary and centrally-developed software, once the owner decides to integrate or replace something, all alternatives are eliminated, usually quickly, in this case in several years. Compare with GNU/POSIX/Linux, where you can still make a comfortable environment for yourself without Wayland or systemd or whatever it is you don't like, and replacements still continue to be maintained and dev…

I've built several tools like this over time. One was rdocul.us. The point of these tools was not to make me money, it was so that I would work myself out of a job. I was at Rails Conf '08 and and some guys in the back room were walking by and saying "it'll be like rdocul.us but BETTER" and I was like cool I don't have to care about that site anymore. It was that or go way too deep into the documentation engine for ruby than I wanted to at the time, crap didn't even build. The other open versions were so tightly coupled to the html output I was going to have to write somthing else. Given I built the site after I 3rd degree separated my shoulder on day 3 of a 12 day ski trip and I was just in the bar self medicating out the rest of the trip till my S/O showed up for the last 2 days, I wasn't really interested in doing more work. So good for them. Didn't even want to say "yo I built that" as I wanted them to feel like they were the underdog. doc sites are so much better these days and I like to think I helped in just a little bit by showing what an online and searchable site would look like with essentially push hooks from github (it polled repos every hour as there were no webhooks then, and anyone could register any repo to be documented).

I've had other OSS projects I've worked on where someone came to us about all the issues with our system and we just said "yea the tech debt we have with this is too high, it'd be a lot easier to re-write and also dump all the old features, but people would be mad if we did that." Which had us put it on life support and suggest the new tool that didn't have those issues.

That's what I as a software dev want out these types of projects. Show what's possible, have the platform holder realize it and do a much better job with full time paid devs. Stuff like FLUX are just better if they're part of the OS. I can't even imagine the hackery that goes into building them when you aren't part of the OS. And how little personal benefit (monetary) you'd get out of them. As opposed to how easy it is for apple to just add it and keep it working as a tested part of the os.

Personally I also get bored with maintenance after a time, esp once a project really solidifies and it is truly just ops work. In fact I know I'm bad at it as I'll go do something else and my previous project will suffer. I take this into consideration highly when deciding what to take on.

Post reply on HN