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Growl in Retirement

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Re: Growl in Retirement

#101

Post by [deleted] »

pram wrote: post #65
eyelidlessness wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible Apple independently arrived at a design for how to present iOS notifications that just happened to resemble growl in every way... but it’s not likely. Growl was so pervasive before macOS notifications that it’s inconceivable to me that developers at Apple weren’t presenting it as a proven model.

Uh huh. This is ignoring that notifications were present in webOS, Android, Windows 7, and so on. Or were those able to independently arrive at the exact same design of a toast popup, and Apple uniquely owes the provenance of their toast popup to Growl?

[deleted]

Re: Growl in Retirement

#102

Post by ChickeNES »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #33
pram wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually true? Notifications were in iOS way before OSX, and it seems like that is the actual implementation that eventually made its way into Mountain Lion. I mean, Toast notifications weren't even invented by Growl. It was nice software but this seems like hyperbole lol

> Toast notifications weren't even invented by Growl Does MSN Messenger get the credit for that?

Windows 2000 according to Wikipedia

Re: Growl in Retirement

#103

Post by nguyenkien »

armadsen wrote: post #78
pram wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh huh. This is ignoring that notifications were present in webOS, Android, Windows 7, and so on. Or were those able to independently arrive at the exact same design of a toast popup, and Apple uniquely owes the provenance of their toast popup to Growl?

Growl existed before webOS, Android, and Windows 7.

Windows have system tray balloon tips since Windows 2000. Or even earlier

Re: Growl in Retirement

#104

Post by bwilliams18 »

varenc wrote: post #16
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…

I don't think OPs frustration was with 'sherlocking' Growl, but with Apple's stance on iOS and the increasing 'lockedownedness' of MacOS.

The MacOS community, and I think many MacOS developers accept that 'sherlocking' is a thing and I see it as something that should be a point of pride for these developers: "we built something so good that Apple decided to rip it off" one oft cited Steve Jobs (through Picaso) quote of course being "good artists copy, great artists steal". But I do understand developers who are frustrated by this happening to their apps, and don't begrudge them for it, especially when it is their source of income.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#106

Post by ChrisGrowl »

thewebcount wrote: post #45
crazygringo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't really that many ways to do notifications. If you want something that pops up on a large screen but isn't overly intrustive, a rectangle with text in it in the corner next to a menu icon to control them is what you're going to come up with. And if you're Apple it'll be a rounded rectangle. And Apple absolutely did not rip off Growl "pixel for pixel", the visual styles are totally different. I don't know…

Not only that, but Apple already had a similar feature in MacOS 8 and 9 that Growl was reproducing in OS X. It seems like Apple just hadn't gotten around to putting it in OS X yet because other things were more important. Then eventually they had time and added it.

I never used macOS until OS X and most definitely did not copy it. Nothing about Growl was a copy of that.

Growl was inspired from being project manager on Adium and worked with the people making colloquy. The devs on colloquy were working on notifications and so we’re we and I thought it was smarter to make it a separate tool.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#108

Post by crazygringo »

armadsen wrote: post #80
crazygringo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't really that many ways to do notifications. If you want something that pops up on a large screen but isn't overly intrustive, a rectangle with text in it in the corner next to a menu icon to control them is what you're going to come up with. And if you're Apple it'll be a rounded rectangle. And Apple absolutely did not rip off Growl "pixel for pixel", the visual styles are totally different. I don't know…

All great design innovations seem dead obvious in hindsight. But they're not.

Huh? Notifications that pop up in the corner aren't a "great design innovation". They are an obvious one.

Just because there are some non-obvious great design innovations out there, doesn't mean every little interface component is one. Some things are just the logical solution to a problem.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#109

Post by eyelidlessness »

perardi wrote: post #87
eyelidlessness wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sorely miss Adium. I’ve learned to accept that I just have half a dozen mostly feature compatible chat apps open to communicate with the people who use them... but Adium was a real gem. I had it configured to minimal everything and never thought about what protocol I was using. Just a consolidated list of people and a tiny window with active chats in tabs. I’ve seen several attempts at unifying the current chat lan…

Ah, memories! I had some teeny, tiny contact list that took up hardly any space on screen. Something like: https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=1473 Compare to Facebook Messenger for Mac, which is gigantic , but doesn’t actually present more information. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/messenger/id1480068668?mt=12

I had one like that then kept shrinking it until it was basically a single list of names that autohid on the right side of my screen. It took a couple years to unlearn the muscle memory of flicking the mouse over there to see activity which is now a bunch of notifications and icon badges and phone buzzes.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#110

Post by [deleted] »

armadsen wrote: post #76
CDRdude wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make an AppleScript thing and call it from bash. I think this is the sort of documentation I used at one point: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...

AppleScript does work well for this. It might also be nice for somebody to write a little UNIX-y command-line app that just allows you to pop up a notification, and potentially get a response to it. Maybe I will...

[deleted]
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