29 ms·

Growl in Retirement

450 points by flyingyeti 6y ago

perardi 6y ago
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 https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Haxie …and as linked in the blog post, Adium. https://adium.im 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 remember when XMPP was everywhere.)
- aroch 6y ago
  Oh Haxies, I remember writing run-time patches (aka, cracks) to bypass licensing/registration for several pieces of software. There was a common framework, whose name no eludes me, that could be almost universally patched giving access to tens (100s?) of software.
  - perardi 6y ago
    I can remember that too, and that will eat away at me for a bit, because that’s non-trivial to search for now.
  - robterrell 6y ago
    AquaticPrime perhaps?
    - aroch 6y ago
      Ah, I think so!
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      Oh man, that thing... - (BOOL)verifyLicenseData:(NSData *)data { return YES; }
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  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 landscape and they all just look like gigantic webviews of the underlying frontend. What a step back!
  - perardi 6y ago
    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 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 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/messenger/id1480068668?mt=12
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      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.
  - hanche 6y ago
    Oh wait, I’m still using Adium. I had no idea it was no more. Admittedly, we only use it at home, over bonjour. My wife and I use it to exchange interesting links and the occasional file. It shows its age, but still works (most of the time) for this purpose.
    - perardi 6y ago
      We were still using Adium at work until September of 2019. Most people were on RocketChat, but we’d had a Jabber server up forever, and people were just in the habit. We finally turned it off. Tangent, sort of: RocketChat is just awful. Push notifications fail, it’s slow, and it just really does not want to mark a message as read. But they insist on having a local on-premises server, so what are you going to do? It’s just so much worse at the basics of chatting than Adium.
- dimmke 6y ago
  This was a total blast from the past. I had forgotten about Adium. I used Growl for years but forgot about that too. I still use Alfred though every day. The CMD + Space for MacOS's version of it is the first thing I disable on new installs.
- kethinov 6y ago
  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.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
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 developed.
- perardi 6y ago
  This seems to be more of an illustration of the “platform owner copied and obviated your idea, so what’s even left to do?” problem.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    That's exactly my point. There is a platform owner.
- grogenaut 6y ago
  I've built several tools like this over time. One was rdocul.us. The point of these tools was not to make me money, it was so that I would work myself out of a job. I was at Rails Conf '08 and and some guys in the back room were walking by and saying "it'll be like rdocul.us but BETTER" and I was like cool I don't have to care about that site anymore. It was that or go way too deep into the documentation engine for ruby than I wanted to at the time, crap didn't even build. The other open versions were so tightly coupled to the html output I was going to have to write somthing else. Given I built the site after I 3rd degree separated my shoulder on day 3 of a 12 day ski trip and I was just in the bar self medicating out the rest of the trip till my S/O showed up for the last 2 days, I wasn't really interested in doing more work. So good for them. Didn't even want to say "yo I built that" as I wanted them to feel like they were the underdog. doc sites are so much better these days and I like to think I helped in just a little bit by showing what an online and searchable site would look like with essentially push hooks from github (it polled repos every hour as there were no webhooks then, and anyone could register any repo to be documented). I've had other OSS projects I've worked on where someone came to us about all the issues with our system and we just said "yea the tech debt we have with this is too high, it'd be a lot easier to re-write and also dump all the old features, but people would be mad if we did that." Which had us put it on life support and suggest the new tool that didn't have those issues. That's what I as a software dev want out these types of projects. Show what's possible, have the platform holder realize it and do a much better job with full time paid devs. Stuff like FLUX are just better if they're part of the OS. I can't even imagine the hackery that goes into building them when you aren't part of the OS. And how little personal benefit (monetary) you'd get out of them. As opposed to how easy it is for apple to just add it and keep it working as a tested part of the os. Personally I also get bored with maintenance after a time, esp once a project really solidifies and it is truly just ops work. In fact I know I'm bad at it as I'll go do something else and my previous project will suffer. I take this into consideration highly when deciding what to take on.
__abc 6y ago
RIP old friend ...
liquidise 6y ago
> 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 real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side. Shun them as you have in recent years and you might find another OS starts to benefit from their weekend projects and innovative ideas.
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  Don’t forget f.lux, now Night Shift.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    I still use f.lux because I find Night Shift doesn't get red enough for me.
    - jchook 6y ago
      On MacOS I found serious performance issues with f.lux and now I happily use redshift[1] without ever thinking about it. 1. http://jonls.dk/redshift/ http://jonls.dk/redshift/
      - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
        f.lux works by simply setting a new ICC profile - right? That’s often supported directly in hardware in the GPU’s scanout system (so it doesn’t appear in your framebuffer). So why would that cause poor performance?
        jchook 6y ago
        I dunno maybe just an older version. Maybe the fade or the menu.
jchook 6y ago
Reminds me of the story of a guy who gets flown out to meet with Microsoft about an acquisition for his extremely useful Windows program, but they never follow up. Instead, they just rip-off his idea verbatim and integrate it into the OS.
- victorgama 6y ago
  Just linking to the original story of appget vs winget: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/ https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
incanus77 6y ago
Super innovative, internet-organized, open source project ahead of its time. I have a special place in my heart for it, too — back when I first started working for myself, and at home, in ‘06-07, I would run Twitteriffic with every incoming tweet posting to Growl. The frequency was low enough that this was not a distraction and every tweet was meaningful. At that time, pretty much all of my followed accounts were also indie, work-at-home Mac devs, and it was a virtual water cooler of sorts. Really was a huge part of me adjusting to working alone and working at home, but still feeling part of a group as the notifications faded by...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
junon 6y ago
Big props to Growl. I remember it being all the rage in terminal emulators back in the day. Thanks for all the work that was done - it was well appreciated.
saagarjha 6y ago
> However at WWDC in 2014 everyone on the team saw the writing on the wall. This was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Notification Center was an OS X Mountain Lion feature, wasn't it? That came out in 2012…
- armadsen 6y ago
  Yeah, it was definitely in 2012. I was there that year (was not in 2014), and remember briefly speaking with at least one of the Growl developers (might have been OP) about it. As I recall, they were (publicly) optimistic about the future of Growl, but of course it seemed clear to me that its days were numbered.
egypturnash 6y ago
I guess I should think about finally switching Quicksilver to use native notifications for whatever iTunes is playing. Or just leave it until I get a new Mac with an OS that Growl won't run on. It works fine and I have better things to do. Thanks for all the unobtrusive notifications that I was able to customize, Mr. The Tick. Spoon!
sly010 6y ago
I think of this as a positive thing. The Growl project achieved it's goal to make macos better for everyone.
teddyh 6y ago
> 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?
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  I thought Growl had that built-in already.
- bamboleo 6y ago
  Why would you do that? Just use the native notifications.
grishka 6y ago
Oh, 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.
- bamboleo 6y ago
  Windows has had a minimal form of standard notifications since Windows XP, which appeared as speech bubbles coming from the bottom right corner.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    Don't forget about Clippy that predated XP by millennia (at least it feels that way).
  - grishka 6y ago
    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.
  - nonesuchluck 6y ago
    Oh wow, I totally forgot about the XP speech bubbles! Did any useful application ever use them? I only remember obnoxious AV warnings and Windows messages ("you can click here to re-open me!") IM notifications may not have been bad.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
Growl 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.
jsz0 6y ago
Impossible to understate how cool and innovative Growl was many years ago before anyone knew what a notification system was. It was a killer app for me back when all we really had was terminal bells or Windows system tray bubbles.
omarforgotpwd 6y ago
Wow, Growl was still around. This took me back to simpler times before notifications.
szatkus 6y ago
Offtopic, but why the black stripe?
- konaraddi 6y ago
  This is why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25235490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25235490
- singhrac 6y ago
  HN is marking the passing of Tony Hsieh.
Scott_Sanderson 6y ago
Crap, I was about to set up growl notifications for my pfSense install.
disposekinetics 6y ago
Growl is some of my favorite software. I still have a 'what if' I think about from time to time. What if Apple had adopted Growl.
mikl 6y ago
I’m kinda surprised they kept it going this long, given that pretty much everything moved to Apple’s Notification Center almost immediately after it was released.
deeviant 6y ago
Are people, in general, supposed to know Growl is? The link provided certainly provides no context nor got me curious enough to google it.
- pfranz 6y ago
  If you have the context of being a geeky Mac user about 10 years ago you likely would. Growl was an open source notification system that many apps supported. Like it said in the article, in 2012 macOS started shipping their own. So the usefulness and popularity dropped. I feel like many of these kinds (especially non-corporate) of blog posts are informal and assume by reading you know what it is. I'm not sure how HN could address this. But I always greatly appreciate when blog posts provide and obvious and quick link to their product page. https://growl.github.io/growl/ https://growl.github.io/growl/
- masklinn 6y ago
  > Are people, in general, supposed to know Growl is? No, but if you don’t then the post is just not relevant to you.
ChrisGrowl 6y ago
I’m the author of this blog post. Feel free to ask me anything.
- tommica 6y ago
  Can you tell some stories of that era? Would love to hear the ups and downs, good and bad.
  - ChrisGrowl 6y ago
    It was a lot of fun back then. There was the c4 stuff and drunkenbatman and then open source stuff. A lot of fun to be had. I don’t see it a lot anymore
makecheck 6y ago
“Growl” is the kind of thing the old Apple used to create: not just solving a problem but doing it well, handling lots of different cases and being cool on top of it all. Meanwhile, today’s Apple gives us something that doesn’t even show you where notification buttons are.
BooneJS 6y ago
I loved growl. There was an iOS app called Prowl that used the growl notification system that I used in a past life to alert me if things in production were weird without me manually checking all the time. Good memories. Thank you Growl!
rodarmor 6y ago
Growl is dead, long live Growl!
bardan 6y ago
I have used Growl for a very long time, and went to lengths to keep it as part of my environment. I'm surprised they held on for as long as they did as it seemed the exact thing that Apple has been trying to torpedo for the last decade, "consistent UI" and all.
getpolarized 6y ago
When I first installed Growl I remember literally thinking "wow, this is really cool!" ... Being a tech geek means my nostalgia memories are 'weird' by normal standards. Super happy now thinking about the time I first installed Growl
0x0 6y ago
I still use HardwareGrowler all the time with Growl, and it is super useful for unobtrusive notifications about usb connects, IP address changes, battery levels, etc. Here's to hoping for a future for HardwareGrowler still.
tabob 6y ago
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”.
- bzb6 6y ago
  Same on Windows. I find desktop notifications to be extremely annoying. On Windows applications can highlight themselves on the taskbar; that is more than enough to call my attention.
  - tabob 6y ago
    I earnestly believe that OS developers and app developers who implement pop-ups or notifications or dialogue boxes would mostly fail the Sociopath test if they were made to take it before being allowed to commit code. This sort of attention-theft feels very malicious to me.
    - lexicality 6y ago
      That is a very weird way to think. Most people find notifications very useful - enough people in fact that Growl being a third party app you have to install in order to get notifications was extremely popular and lasted for 17 years. Some applications do seem to think they are more valuable to you than they actually are, but that's usually going to be product managers with an inflated sense of their own importance rather than trying to attack you. You say you have ADHD. I also have ADHD and I can tell you that NTs generally aren't malicious or sociopaths or intentionally trying to destroy our focus - they're just ignorant and building for what they know in the same way sighted developers tend to produce websites blind users can't access.
- ChrisGrowl 6y ago
  Which is why we split visual displays and actions in Growl 2. You could entirely disable visual displays and set actions for specific notifications.
- 6y ago
fierarul 6y ago
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.
- latexr 6y ago
  > 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/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/MacAutomationScriptingGuide/DisplayNotifications.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016239-CH61-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
  - fierarul 6y ago
    I knew you can use `osascript` but this still does not tell me if it works with unsigned apps or not. For all we know `osascript` is signed which means it respects the rules.
    - latexr 6y ago
      You can call `osascript` from inside your app, or you can export an AppleScript script as an app. So yes, it works on unsigned apps. It has the same Gatekeeper caveats as any other unsigned app, but there’s nothing about notifications that’s especially locked.
      - fierarul 6y ago
        Can I natively call the Objective C API from an unsigned app or not?

450 points by flyingyeti 6y ago

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 https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Haxie …and as linked in the blog post, Adium. https://adium.im 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 remember when XMPP was everywhere.)

aroch 6y ago
Oh Haxies, I remember writing run-time patches (aka, cracks) to bypass licensing/registration for several pieces of software. There was a common framework, whose name no eludes me, that could be almost universally patched giving access to tens (100s?) of software.
- perardi 6y ago
  I can remember that too, and that will eat away at me for a bit, because that’s non-trivial to search for now.
- robterrell 6y ago
  AquaticPrime perhaps?
  - aroch 6y ago
    Ah, I think so!
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Oh man, that thing... - (BOOL)verifyLicenseData:(NSData *)data { return YES; }
eyelidlessness 6y ago
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 landscape and they all just look like gigantic webviews of the underlying frontend. What a step back!
- perardi 6y ago
  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 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 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/messenger/id1480068668?mt=12
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    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.
- hanche 6y ago
  Oh wait, I’m still using Adium. I had no idea it was no more. Admittedly, we only use it at home, over bonjour. My wife and I use it to exchange interesting links and the occasional file. It shows its age, but still works (most of the time) for this purpose.
  - perardi 6y ago
    We were still using Adium at work until September of 2019. Most people were on RocketChat, but we’d had a Jabber server up forever, and people were just in the habit. We finally turned it off. Tangent, sort of: RocketChat is just awful. Push notifications fail, it’s slow, and it just really does not want to mark a message as read. But they insist on having a local on-premises server, so what are you going to do? It’s just so much worse at the basics of chatting than Adium.
dimmke 6y ago
This was a total blast from the past. I had forgotten about Adium. I used Growl for years but forgot about that too. I still use Alfred though every day. The CMD + Space for MacOS's version of it is the first thing I disable on new installs.
kethinov 6y ago
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.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

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 developed.

perardi 6y ago
This seems to be more of an illustration of the “platform owner copied and obviated your idea, so what’s even left to do?” problem.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  That's exactly my point. There is a platform owner.
grogenaut 6y ago
I've built several tools like this over time. One was rdocul.us. The point of these tools was not to make me money, it was so that I would work myself out of a job. I was at Rails Conf '08 and and some guys in the back room were walking by and saying "it'll be like rdocul.us but BETTER" and I was like cool I don't have to care about that site anymore. It was that or go way too deep into the documentation engine for ruby than I wanted to at the time, crap didn't even build. The other open versions were so tightly coupled to the html output I was going to have to write somthing else. Given I built the site after I 3rd degree separated my shoulder on day 3 of a 12 day ski trip and I was just in the bar self medicating out the rest of the trip till my S/O showed up for the last 2 days, I wasn't really interested in doing more work. So good for them. Didn't even want to say "yo I built that" as I wanted them to feel like they were the underdog. doc sites are so much better these days and I like to think I helped in just a little bit by showing what an online and searchable site would look like with essentially push hooks from github (it polled repos every hour as there were no webhooks then, and anyone could register any repo to be documented). I've had other OSS projects I've worked on where someone came to us about all the issues with our system and we just said "yea the tech debt we have with this is too high, it'd be a lot easier to re-write and also dump all the old features, but people would be mad if we did that." Which had us put it on life support and suggest the new tool that didn't have those issues. That's what I as a software dev want out these types of projects. Show what's possible, have the platform holder realize it and do a much better job with full time paid devs. Stuff like FLUX are just better if they're part of the OS. I can't even imagine the hackery that goes into building them when you aren't part of the OS. And how little personal benefit (monetary) you'd get out of them. As opposed to how easy it is for apple to just add it and keep it working as a tested part of the os. Personally I also get bored with maintenance after a time, esp once a project really solidifies and it is truly just ops work. In fact I know I'm bad at it as I'll go do something else and my previous project will suffer. I take this into consideration highly when deciding what to take on.

__abc 6y ago

RIP old friend ...

liquidise 6y ago

> 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 real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side. Shun them as you have in recent years and you might find another OS starts to benefit from their weekend projects and innovative ideas.

TechBro8615 6y ago
Don’t forget f.lux, now Night Shift.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I still use f.lux because I find Night Shift doesn't get red enough for me.
  - jchook 6y ago
    On MacOS I found serious performance issues with f.lux and now I happily use redshift[1] without ever thinking about it. 1. http://jonls.dk/redshift/ http://jonls.dk/redshift/
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      f.lux works by simply setting a new ICC profile - right? That’s often supported directly in hardware in the GPU’s scanout system (so it doesn’t appear in your framebuffer). So why would that cause poor performance?
      - jchook 6y ago
        I dunno maybe just an older version. Maybe the fade or the menu.

jchook 6y ago

Reminds me of the story of a guy who gets flown out to meet with Microsoft about an acquisition for his extremely useful Windows program, but they never follow up. Instead, they just rip-off his idea verbatim and integrate it into the OS.

victorgama 6y ago
Just linking to the original story of appget vs winget: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/ https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/

incanus77 6y ago

Super innovative, internet-organized, open source project ahead of its time. I have a special place in my heart for it, too — back when I first started working for myself, and at home, in ‘06-07, I would run Twitteriffic with every incoming tweet posting to Growl. The frequency was low enough that this was not a distraction and every tweet was meaningful. At that time, pretty much all of my followed accounts were also indie, work-at-home Mac devs, and it was a virtual water cooler of sorts. Really was a huge part of me adjusting to working alone and working at home, but still feeling part of a group as the notifications faded by...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

junon 6y ago

Big props to Growl. I remember it being all the rage in terminal emulators back in the day. Thanks for all the work that was done - it was well appreciated.

saagarjha 6y ago

> However at WWDC in 2014 everyone on the team saw the writing on the wall. This was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Notification Center was an OS X Mountain Lion feature, wasn't it? That came out in 2012…

armadsen 6y ago
Yeah, it was definitely in 2012. I was there that year (was not in 2014), and remember briefly speaking with at least one of the Growl developers (might have been OP) about it. As I recall, they were (publicly) optimistic about the future of Growl, but of course it seemed clear to me that its days were numbered.

egypturnash 6y ago

I guess I should think about finally switching Quicksilver to use native notifications for whatever iTunes is playing. Or just leave it until I get a new Mac with an OS that Growl won't run on. It works fine and I have better things to do. Thanks for all the unobtrusive notifications that I was able to customize, Mr. The Tick. Spoon!

sly010 6y ago

I think of this as a positive thing. The Growl project achieved it's goal to make macos better for everyone.

teddyh 6y ago

> 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?

LeoPanthera 6y ago
I thought Growl had that built-in already.
bamboleo 6y ago
Why would you do that? Just use the native notifications.

grishka 6y ago

Oh, 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.

bamboleo 6y ago
Windows has had a minimal form of standard notifications since Windows XP, which appeared as speech bubbles coming from the bottom right corner.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Don't forget about Clippy that predated XP by millennia (at least it feels that way).
- grishka 6y ago
  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.
- nonesuchluck 6y ago
  Oh wow, I totally forgot about the XP speech bubbles! Did any useful application ever use them? I only remember obnoxious AV warnings and Windows messages ("you can click here to re-open me!") IM notifications may not have been bad.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

Growl 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.

jsz0 6y ago

Impossible to understate how cool and innovative Growl was many years ago before anyone knew what a notification system was. It was a killer app for me back when all we really had was terminal bells or Windows system tray bubbles.

omarforgotpwd 6y ago

Wow, Growl was still around. This took me back to simpler times before notifications.

szatkus 6y ago

Offtopic, but why the black stripe?

konaraddi 6y ago
This is why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25235490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25235490
singhrac 6y ago
HN is marking the passing of Tony Hsieh.

Scott_Sanderson 6y ago

Crap, I was about to set up growl notifications for my pfSense install.

disposekinetics 6y ago

Growl is some of my favorite software. I still have a 'what if' I think about from time to time. What if Apple had adopted Growl.

mikl 6y ago

I’m kinda surprised they kept it going this long, given that pretty much everything moved to Apple’s Notification Center almost immediately after it was released.

deeviant 6y ago

Are people, in general, supposed to know Growl is? The link provided certainly provides no context nor got me curious enough to google it.

pfranz 6y ago
If you have the context of being a geeky Mac user about 10 years ago you likely would. Growl was an open source notification system that many apps supported. Like it said in the article, in 2012 macOS started shipping their own. So the usefulness and popularity dropped. I feel like many of these kinds (especially non-corporate) of blog posts are informal and assume by reading you know what it is. I'm not sure how HN could address this. But I always greatly appreciate when blog posts provide and obvious and quick link to their product page. https://growl.github.io/growl/ https://growl.github.io/growl/
masklinn 6y ago
> Are people, in general, supposed to know Growl is? No, but if you don’t then the post is just not relevant to you.

ChrisGrowl 6y ago

I’m the author of this blog post. Feel free to ask me anything.

tommica 6y ago
Can you tell some stories of that era? Would love to hear the ups and downs, good and bad.
- ChrisGrowl 6y ago
  It was a lot of fun back then. There was the c4 stuff and drunkenbatman and then open source stuff. A lot of fun to be had. I don’t see it a lot anymore

makecheck 6y ago

“Growl” is the kind of thing the old Apple used to create: not just solving a problem but doing it well, handling lots of different cases and being cool on top of it all. Meanwhile, today’s Apple gives us something that doesn’t even show you where notification buttons are.

BooneJS 6y ago

I loved growl. There was an iOS app called Prowl that used the growl notification system that I used in a past life to alert me if things in production were weird without me manually checking all the time. Good memories. Thank you Growl!

rodarmor 6y ago

Growl is dead, long live Growl!

bardan 6y ago

I have used Growl for a very long time, and went to lengths to keep it as part of my environment. I'm surprised they held on for as long as they did as it seemed the exact thing that Apple has been trying to torpedo for the last decade, "consistent UI" and all.

getpolarized 6y ago

When I first installed Growl I remember literally thinking "wow, this is really cool!" ... Being a tech geek means my nostalgia memories are 'weird' by normal standards. Super happy now thinking about the time I first installed Growl

0x0 6y ago

I still use HardwareGrowler all the time with Growl, and it is super useful for unobtrusive notifications about usb connects, IP address changes, battery levels, etc. Here's to hoping for a future for HardwareGrowler still.

tabob 6y ago

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”.

bzb6 6y ago
Same on Windows. I find desktop notifications to be extremely annoying. On Windows applications can highlight themselves on the taskbar; that is more than enough to call my attention.
- tabob 6y ago
  I earnestly believe that OS developers and app developers who implement pop-ups or notifications or dialogue boxes would mostly fail the Sociopath test if they were made to take it before being allowed to commit code. This sort of attention-theft feels very malicious to me.
  - lexicality 6y ago
    That is a very weird way to think. Most people find notifications very useful - enough people in fact that Growl being a third party app you have to install in order to get notifications was extremely popular and lasted for 17 years. Some applications do seem to think they are more valuable to you than they actually are, but that's usually going to be product managers with an inflated sense of their own importance rather than trying to attack you. You say you have ADHD. I also have ADHD and I can tell you that NTs generally aren't malicious or sociopaths or intentionally trying to destroy our focus - they're just ignorant and building for what they know in the same way sighted developers tend to produce websites blind users can't access.
ChrisGrowl 6y ago
Which is why we split visual displays and actions in Growl 2. You could entirely disable visual displays and set actions for specific notifications.
6y ago

fierarul 6y ago

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.

latexr 6y ago
> 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/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/MacAutomationScriptingGuide/DisplayNotifications.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016239-CH61-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
- fierarul 6y ago
  I knew you can use `osascript` but this still does not tell me if it works with unsigned apps or not. For all we know `osascript` is signed which means it respects the rules.
  - latexr 6y ago
    You can call `osascript` from inside your app, or you can export an AppleScript script as an app. So yes, it works on unsigned apps. It has the same Gatekeeper caveats as any other unsigned app, but there’s nothing about notifications that’s especially locked.
    - fierarul 6y ago
      Can I natively call the Objective C API from an unsigned app or not?