After 17 Years OS X Notifier App 'Growl' Retired (github.io) 17
Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years.
Its page on GitHub explains: Growl is a notification system for OS X. Growl has been around since 2004, and was originally called Global Notifications Center. The name was changed to Growl (like the noise a dog makes) since we felt the name Notifications Center was too geeky. We were wrong about that haha.
Growl was meant as a proof of concept which became something more for a long period of time. Before Growl was made developers either had to pop up a very basic window or some other ugliness nobody liked. Working with developers on Adium and Colloquy who wanted to implement their own custom notifications into their applications is what birthed this project.
Growl is a retired project, we couldn't think of another thing to change which would be substantial enough to bring out a new updated release. Growl is stable and should work for as long as intel based programs work. Anyone who wants to run Growl is free to do so in an unsupported fashion.
Lead developer Christopher Forsythe writes at 336699.org: With the announcement of Apple's new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple's notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we're announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.
It's been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career... There's even a SourceForge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it... Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X, iOS, Android or who knows what else...
For developers we recommend transitioning away from Growl at this point. The apps themselves are gone from the app store, however the code itself still lives. Everything from our rake build system to our code is available for use on our GitHub page.
Its page on GitHub explains: Growl is a notification system for OS X. Growl has been around since 2004, and was originally called Global Notifications Center. The name was changed to Growl (like the noise a dog makes) since we felt the name Notifications Center was too geeky. We were wrong about that haha.
Growl was meant as a proof of concept which became something more for a long period of time. Before Growl was made developers either had to pop up a very basic window or some other ugliness nobody liked. Working with developers on Adium and Colloquy who wanted to implement their own custom notifications into their applications is what birthed this project.
Growl is a retired project, we couldn't think of another thing to change which would be substantial enough to bring out a new updated release. Growl is stable and should work for as long as intel based programs work. Anyone who wants to run Growl is free to do so in an unsupported fashion.
Lead developer Christopher Forsythe writes at 336699.org: With the announcement of Apple's new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple's notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we're announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.
It's been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career... There's even a SourceForge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it... Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X, iOS, Android or who knows what else...
For developers we recommend transitioning away from Growl at this point. The apps themselves are gone from the app store, however the code itself still lives. Everything from our rake build system to our code is available for use on our GitHub page.
Goodnight, sweet prince (Score:5, Interesting)
This was a fantastic utility app back in the day. I used this throughout the Tiger/Leopard period in OS X and was always impressed by the configurability the developers provided. Can't blame the developers for abandoning the project, though...notifications have been of about the same utility in OS X since...Lion? (Not that notification center is anything to write home about).
Re:Goodnight, sweet prince (Score:5, Interesting)
For those early days of OSX, I believe that a handful of open source programs that were very well-designed made a huge difference in OSX adoption. Adium (mentioned in TFA) is another example of a great program.
Re: (Score:3)
I miss the old Mac OS X with its aqua theme.
Re:Goodnight, sweet prince (Score:4, Informative)
And Adium is also more or less abandoned. It still technically works, but it lacks support for modern IMs, and most of the current Pidgin plugins don't work in Adium.
And unfortunately since Adium exists, there's no port of mainline Pidgin for macOS.
Re: (Score:1)
OK boomer
Re: (Score:1)
Same here, I used it with Adium and Colloquy, both great apps for their time. Obviously far less relevant in the past decade since notifications because a first class operation system feature.
I wonder if they feel they got "Sherlocked" (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember the Growl project was hoping Apple would adopt it for use in the OS; they obviously went with their own implementation.
And when I say "Sherlocked", I mean basically being copied [youtube.com] without acknowledgement.
Re: (Score:3)
I remember the Growl project was hoping Apple would adopt it for use in the OS; they obviously went with their own implementation.
And when I say "Sherlocked", I mean basically being copied [youtube.com] without acknowledgement.
Pretty much. Although to be fair, Apple had recognized for a while the necessity of system-level non-modal dialog boxes and the benefits of standardization. Mac OS 9 introduced non-modal dialogs [informatimago.com] as part of an update to the Notification Manager and they've been around ever since. From there, though, Apple did its usual '90s-2000s thing.
Windows? (Score:2)
While Growl started on OSX, there's a successful port to Windows... and I can't think of any way for my server to send me status messages about a unique application. Maybe development is finished, but why is this being abandoned?
Pushover (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Good one... I'm looking into it. Seems like a good way for a PHP site to phone home.
Never heard of it (Score:3)
And I've been using MacOS for 4 years now. Presumably one of those niche programs thats really useful for those who need it and utterly irrelevant for those who don't.
Re:Never heard of it (Score:5, Insightful)
Replaced by... (Score:2)
Used it as alternative to Cocoa Dialog (Score:2)
I'm not sure if I actually ever really used it, but I have a 12 year old Perl script where it is called when Cocoa Dialog is not available. I also don't remember why I prefered CocoaDialog and tried that first.
In case anyone cares to see how it can look when called in a script, here is that part:
my $me = basename("$0");
my $notify_name = "$me";
my $notify_title = "$notify_name - $VERSION";
my $notify_id = "cc_$$";
sub mynotify {
my $msg = join("\n", @_);
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