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Growl in Retirement

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Re: Growl in Retirement

#211

Post by coddle-hark »

jolux wrote: post #207
gear54rus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same way it is up to me how you use books you bought (kindle) or songs you bought (any streaming crap nowadays). If you're shitty enough person (good businessman) you can profit off of anything.

DRM on books is about the rights holder, not the person selling it. I can assure you that Amazon doesn’t actually give a shit what you do with your books outside of having an obligation to the rights holders.

Easy access to a huge library of books is one of the main selling points of the Kindle. DRM is good for Amazon.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#212

Post by csunbird »

bipson wrote: post #194
supermatt wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said "in Europe", when you must have meant "in Norway". In the UK there were DEFINITELY carrier branded phones, tethering was disabled by many carriers, and you couldn't even use a regular SIM card in a non-phone device - you needed a "data sim". I travelled around Europe for 2 years using local SIM cards - and also encountered carriers which disabled tethering. There were even android apps specifically to work a…

Same for Austria, which interestingly was considered a "test-market" for international carriers, thus we always had the cheaper contracts and some novel business models quite some time before the rest of the EU (unfortunately not network generations or coverage in general). The answer is money. Tethering was usually not allowed but you could buy in. You get phones for free, but only if you pay 40€+ a month for the ne…

This is how the free market should work. Providers tried to extract more money by forcing contracts, other providers swooped in with contractless plans and captured a significant market share.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#213

Post by crazygringo »

ChrisGrowl wrote: post #119
crazygringo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Growl did more than pop into a corner. :)

Oh absolutely. :) But I assumed the accusation that Apple copied Growl was mainly that.

Growl had so much configurability, so many options, it's not like Apple implemented really any of that!

Re: Growl in Retirement

#214

Post by crazygringo »

hibbelig wrote: post #143
crazygringo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Notifications could also be shown in the menu bar, with marquee scrolling. No need for them to pop up in a corner.

Marquee scrolling is virtually always a terrible UX pattern.

Also oftentime there is zero extra space in the menu bar.

Alerts and notifications have followed a pop-up pattern since basically forever in computing.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#215

Post by crazygringo »

wpietri wrote: post #127
crazygringo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh? In your estimation, how many years passed between Growl being technically possible and it actually existing? I was using NeXT OS, which is what later became OS X, circa 1990. Growl apparently launched in 2003. So that's a minimum of 13 years that something "obvious" was missed. And it's probably more fair to count from the mid-1980s, when GUIs first started becoming popular. That doesn't sound obvious to me. Most…

Pop-up notifications from background processes only really became necessary once people started having a lot of internet-connected programs that needed to notify you of incoming things. Back when the only thing was your e-mail inbox, you didn't need a separate notification service.

Obviously then it was then extended for things like a long process completing, etc.

But back in 1990 or 1995, there's wasn't a need for something like Growl. Your e-mail inbox and the occasional beep and modal dialog did the job just fine.

To counter your "most things are obvious in retrospect" philosophy, you might be interested in the "multiple discovery" viewpoint [1] which says precisely the opposite -- that, extended to design, essentially says that the need for a solution becomes obvious to people at about the same time, and that people will solve it in similar ways because they're facing the same constraints.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Re: Growl in Retirement

#216

Post by wpietri »

crazygringo wrote: post #215
wpietri wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh? In your estimation, how many years passed between Growl being technically possible and it actually existing? I was using NeXT OS, which is what later became OS X, circa 1990. Growl apparently launched in 2003. So that's a minimum of 13 years that something "obvious" was missed. And it's probably more fair to count from the mid-1980s, when GUIs first started becoming popular. That doesn't sound obvious to me. Most…

Pop-up notifications from background processes only really became necessary once people started having a lot of internet-connected programs that needed to notify you of incoming things. Back when the only thing was your e-mail inbox, you didn't need a separate notification service. Obviously then it was then extended for things like a long process completing, etc. But back in 1990 or 1995, there's wasn't a need for s…

Modal dialogs were always terrible. They were just easy to code, and fit the common programmer mental model of code first, not user first. The NeXT folks clearly recognized that background activity was a concern given how they were using the dock to give app-specific notification. But design-wise it was a cul de sac because it required permanent screen real estate for anything that might matter.

I also don't think multiple discovery is much of a counter to "most things are obvious in retrospect". Yes, design problems can get solved in similar ways by different people. But obvious-in-retrospect thinking is a cognitive error, where we presume that what's obvious to us is obvious to people in different times and conditions.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#217

Post by ChrisGrowl »

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…

Before OS X I used slackware. At the time it did most of what I needed. I found the community around it lacking.

When I found OS X open source folks they were beyond welcoming. This is one of the bigger reasons Growl was on os x and not Linux.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#218

Post by jolux »

coddle-hark wrote: post #211
jolux wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM on books is about the rights holder, not the person selling it. I can assure you that Amazon doesn’t actually give a shit what you do with your books outside of having an obligation to the rights holders.

Easy access to a huge library of books is one of the main selling points of the Kindle. DRM is good for Amazon.

Yeah, because they wouldn’t be able to offer it otherwise. If they could offer the same content without DRM at the same price, I’m certain they would do it. Apple did with the iTunes Store.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#219

Post by wpietri »

Someone wrote: post #174
wpietri wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh? In your estimation, how many years passed between Growl being technically possible and it actually existing? I was using NeXT OS, which is what later became OS X, circa 1990. Growl apparently launched in 2003. So that's a minimum of 13 years that something "obvious" was missed. And it's probably more fair to count from the mid-1980s, when GUIs first started becoming popular. That doesn't sound obvious to me. Most…

I don’t think it’s that easy. Timing is a factor, too. For such a thing to be successful, you also need a OS/hardware combo that can draw the notification without slowing down using the main window (rules out early Mac OS) and users who think the added distraction of notifications is worth it. I would that added distraction goes down with screen size. I doubt it would have been a success on 640×480 displays, for exam…

Fair point. 1984 is probably too early. But the NeXT, which was launched in 1988, meets the technical criteria: big screen, fast display rendering, background processes. It had ongoing notification via the dock. And as somebody who used them then, background notifications would have been way better than interruptive modal dialogs seizing the foreground, which were the common UI choice.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#220

Post by willfiveash »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #71
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 do you send a notification now without Growl? Each time I try to google for a tutorial, they all say “just use growl.” Ultimately I gave up and installed growl, and it works quite nicely. I’d just like to pop up a notification programmatically via a bash script. :)

I'm using Pushover (https://pushover.net/) to send notifications to my Apple devices. To make use of it easier on command line I wrote a simple Python script which I've found to be very useful for things like allowing Transmission to send notifications when a download is finished or in scripts that do backup jobs which take a long time, letting me know when my Mac has booted, etc... Reply to this comment if you're interested in my script (note that the pushover site has good examples of how to call their API).
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