> For developers we recommend transitioning away from Growl at this point. Couldn’t someone write a Growl-compatible layer which is a shim to Apple’s Notification Center?
I thought Growl had that built-in already.
Growl in Retirement
51–60 of 245 posts
Re: Growl in Retirement
#52> For developers we recommend transitioning away from Growl at this point. Couldn’t someone write a Growl-compatible layer which is a shim to Apple’s Notification Center?
Why would you do that? Just use the native notifications.
Re: Growl in Retirement
#53> 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…
It's similar to people building their own computer rigs. I built my own computers when I was younger and broke. It was cheaper to buy the parts and do the build yourself than it was to buy an off the shelf solution. It's also a great way to learn about the computer. As I got older, I would still lean toward building computers. However, today, I have way more responsibilities to be building the hardware, and my time is way too valuable to care about doing that myself. I just need the damn thing to work, and when it doesn't, there's a person to contact about resolving the situation. Between work, family, hobbies, etc, I have chosen to no longer care about these customizations/tweaks. There's really nothing different today for me to learn about a computer by doing the build myself: cpu, ram, bus, i/o controllers, etc. The core fundamentals are the same, just tech and speed has changed. My current devices have stock backgrounds. Rarely do I see my desktop as I have too many windows open doing actual work.
TL;DR I too care much less about this, but understand why others do. I encourage them to keep doing it even if I don't personally spend time with it.
Re: Growl in Retirement
#54Oh, I remember this thing. It felt like an essential part of the system before native notifications were introduced, and then was promptly forgotten. Literally every single app that had notifications used it — with the notable exception of Apple's own ones. Coming from Windows, where every app implemented its own notifications that looked inconsistent and overlapped each other, this was a night and day difference.
Windows has had a minimal form of standard notifications since Windows XP, which appeared as speech bubbles coming from the bottom right corner.
Don't forget about Clippy that predated XP by millennia (at least it feels that way).
Re: Growl in Retirement
#55Oh, I remember this thing. It felt like an essential part of the system before native notifications were introduced, and then was promptly forgotten. Literally every single app that had notifications used it — with the notable exception of Apple's own ones. Coming from Windows, where every app implemented its own notifications that looked inconsistent and overlapped each other, this was a night and day difference.
Windows has had a minimal form of standard notifications since Windows XP, which appeared as speech bubbles coming from the bottom right corner.
I know, but these didn't really work for stuff like instant messaging, and only one could be displayed at a time system-wide, so everyone made their own thing.
Re: Growl in Retirement
#56Growl was one of the projects that made me fall in love with the Mac. The themes, the ability to script to it in the PWA precursors I used to build (SSBs), and the easy way to plug it into your own apps. It was a core part of what made Mac apps in the Delicious Generation so special and so much better than apps on any other OS. I still think apps of that vintage are the height of good desktop application development.
When Growl moved to the Mac App Store, the writing was on the wall. I was so happy the team had a way to support themselves but the changes being made in Mac OS X (then known as OS X), even before Notification Center, definitely made stuff harder. After Notification Center and its adoption/similarity, and with the way macOS continued to restrict kernel extensions/modifications/plugins, it stopped being used as much by others. It ended up becoming difficult to install/run, and I gave up a few years ago, even though that meant some of my custom tools would no longer work the same way.
Huge kudos to the developers and the community. Seventeen years is a hell of a run.
Re: Growl in Retirement
#57> 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…
I still have yet to find a satisfactory replacement for Quicksilver. Yes, Alfred and all those exist. They are mere shades by comparison.
I feel like Launchbar, which I believe predates Quicksilver, is pretty great. It’s true Quicksilver really perfected that motif of doing custom search operators and file manipulation, but Launchbar is really great.
Re: Growl in Retirement
#58> 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…
Who is shunning developers on the Mac? If anything I think most Mac users lament the dramatic shift toward cross platform/Electron apps.
Re: Growl in Retirement
#59> 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…
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
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.
Re: Growl in Retirement
#60Earlier 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.
Wait wat? I’m not disputing this but I came up on MacOS (it wasn’t even named that at the time, I believe I got started on System 6) and I never saw notifications like that.