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Growl in Retirement

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Re: Growl in Retirement

#221

Post by sgerenser »

pornel wrote: post #195
dochtman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to think about the fact that, now that Macs are starting to be differentiated more by hardware (again, due to Apple Silicon) than software, Apple might actually allow more tweaking/low-level access to do interesting stuff.

Performance of A14X is almost the same as M1, but it only became a sensation when the CPU was allowed to run macOS. Think about it: Apple already had an awesome CPU, but hardly anybody noticed, because iPad OS is so limited.

Not true, there is no A14X (yet). Closest thing would be the A12Z in the 2020 iPad Pros which are impressive but ~25% slower than the M1.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#222

Post by hibbelig »

crazygringo wrote: post #214
hibbelig wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

About the space: I was thinking the text could replace the icons on the right hand side for a short while (until the user has had the time to read it).

Emacs displays little notes in the echo area at the bottom of the screen, though those are always (?) triggered by user actions and do not come from background activity. Which also qualifies as "since basically forever", I would say.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#223

Post by robertoandred »

bitexploder wrote: post #97
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…

And locking the OS behind a gilded cage and not letting developers tinker. I’m done with MacOS as of Big Sur. M1 is massively intriguing but I am done with macs for a while. Over half of my companies 2018 macs had battery bloat and broken keyboards. Bloat breaks the keyboard. Half! It’s a real shame. I can’t abide by it anymore, as a developer I feel shunned by the OS now.

They're not stopping anyone from tinkering.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#224

Post by Arubis »

jspash wrote: post #170
Arubis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have yet to find a satisfactory replacement for Quicksilver. Yes, Alfred and all those exist. They are mere shades by comparison.

Just curious..what is it you find lacking about Alfred? I swapped a few years ago when QS was having some wobbles with releases keeping up with Mac OS releases. I forget what the exact issues were at the time. It took about 3 months to find and replace my QS workflow but now I love it.

It turns out that this is now hard to answer! I tried finding the original articles and screencasts I’d used to get started, and they’re all on dead domains and Google Video. The tl;dr version is Proxy Objects And Their Implications. QS was (and remains) a serviceable launcher, but it shone most as a way to construct functional sentences, similar to UNIX pipes but for the MacOS GUI. Being able to do trigger->Current App Menu Contents->(type name of menu item) was already rad. “Select all these files, compress them into a single archive, then attach them to an email with the following subject” from your launcher was doable and even straightforward. “Capture text/current clipboard and apply a preset template for this keybinding and append to my Capture file” was essentially the first pass for how people did GTD capture on Mac.

Granted, a lot of the is now doable with specialized apps, but to no longer have so flexible and versatile a tool makes me sad.

I can’t build demos at the moment, as my Mac has been in the shop with Apple for almost a month now with precious little communication—but that’s another rant entirely.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#225

Post by Arubis »

agustif wrote: post #169
Arubis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have yet to find a satisfactory replacement for Quicksilver. Yes, Alfred and all those exist. They are mere shades by comparison.

Raycaster is the only thing is looking better than alfred for me right now

I was unable to find this with a bit of googling; do you have a link?

Re: Growl in Retirement

#227

Post by kethinov »

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…

I would still be using Adium today if they had made it a fully featured Matrix client. I moved to Element instead, which is nice, but I always liked Adium's UX better.

Anyone know why support for Matrix was never added to Adium? I never quite understood that given its robust support for XMPP.

Re: Growl in Retirement

#228

Post by latexr »

fierarul wrote: post #206

I'm still salty that the macOS Notification Center was introduced as a "for-pay" API as it initially worked only on AppStore apps and then on signed apps. I'm still not sure if it works on unsigned apps, but considering all apps must be notarized on macOS, it doesn't really matter anymore.

> I'm still not sure if it works on unsigned apps

You don’t even need an app; you can show a dialog from AppleScript. Using a shell:

  /usr/bin/osascript -e 'display notification "whatever"'
You can add a title, subtitle, and sound[1]. Adding a custom icon is trickier and does require a built app.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...

Re: Growl in Retirement

#229

Post by latexr »

tabob wrote: post #163

I can say that Growl and desktop notifications are the very first thing I disable. Not once on 20 years of computing did I ever think: “I want applications to interrupt what I’m doing and steal my limited ADHD focus because they’re lonely and need attention”.

> Not once on 20 years of computing did I ever think: “I want applications to interrupt what I’m doing and steal my limited ADHD focus because they’re lonely and need attention”.

You don’t need to allow notifications from random apps to make them work for you:

  your-long-running-script && osascript -e 'display notification "Done"' || osascript -e 'display notification "There was an error!"'

Re: Growl in Retirement

#230

Post by Camillo »

ChrisGrowl wrote: post #202
Camillo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I _think_ when Growl came out it was an open-source implementation of a notification UX that Apple had already demoed, either as a prototype or in some first-party apps, but it's just a vague memory. Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Nope, I came up with it and that didn’t happen.

I think I was thinking of iChat. If someone started a conversation with you while it was in the background, it would display a small pop-up window in the corner of your screen, which you could click to start the chat. It appears in a screenshot here (from 2002): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2002/09/macosx-10-2/12/

So the basic design of the notification UI (small pop-up window, short and long, icon on the left, click to respond) was already in iChat. Other chat clients for Mac (Adium, Colloquy) were trying to imitate it, as I recall (and ended up improving on it).

This is also interesting on Growl's early history: https://web.archive.org/web/20060115015145/http://www.drunke...

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