8 ms·

Growl 1.3.1 is out, no longer free

91 points by avirambm 15y ago

lautis 15y ago
Even though Growl 1.3.0 was distributed via App Store with the same price tag, the source code was published at http://code.google.com/p/growl/source http://code.google.com/p/growl/source. Seems like that practice has stopped as well.
- nspragmatic 15y ago
  http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920faf093 http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...
  - chow 15y ago
    Thank you for posting that; the headline of this story implies that the new version is less free than 1.3.0, which does not seem to be the case.
vertr 15y ago
I've always had a love/hate relationship with growl. Sometimes it just seems a bit excessive and overly distracting. With growl being a paid app now, will developer support wane? Now that I have to buy it, it might be a good reason to stop being distracted by it for me. It would have been a better solution if they released a free stripped down version, and a 'Pro' version with the new toys.
- Zev 15y ago
  With growl being a paid app now, will developer support wane? If anything, this will help increase core Growl developer support; they actually profit from spending time on Growl now.
  - tom9729 15y ago
    I think he was questioning whether developers will continue using Growl notifications.
    - Zev 15y ago
      That isn't how I read his statement, even after reading your reply to me. However.. the SDK is still free, easy to integrate (having done the integration process myself) and users still like it. That last point is, really, the important part here.
      - dreww 15y ago
        since you're being deliberately obtuse, i'll spell it out for you on his behalf. WILL USERS STILL LIKE IT, WHICH IS WHAT GETS DEVELOPER SUPPORT, NOW THAT IT COSTS MONEY?
        Zev 15y ago
        You know? I had a long post written out. About how I'm actually one of those developers who you're questioning and so on. But, none of that is relevant. The only thing that matters is this: Growl is the #2 app in the entire Mac App Store. It has been in that position since the Growl developers first put it on the App Store weeks ago. The only thing outselling Growl is Mac OS X itself. So, please. The next time you want to accuse someone of being "deliberately obtuse", consider that the person you are talking to might actually know what they're talking about and step back before you make yourself look silly and condescending. :)
      - dextorious 15y ago
        He means THIRD PARTY developers, not Growl developers themselves.
    - vertr 15y ago
      This is what I meant.
- zacwest 15y ago
  The 1.3 SDK allows for applications to generate Growl notifications without Growl installed. This is called "Mist" and is a new feature of the 1.3 SDK. Thus, Growl becomes the "pro" version of Growl when installed, allowing you to customize the notifications, and the "free" version is the built-in notifications. I think this will, if anything, increase the usage of Growl by third-party developers.
- sjs 15y ago
  You can deliver Growl support built-in to your app, users just won't be able to customize the appearance and tweak other knobs unless they buy Growl themselves. Seems like a very reasonable compromise to me.
bauchidgw 15y ago
does this mean other apps won't install this attention parasite per default?
- yoklov 15y ago
  Typically I've found that they ask first, however even that is annoying. I don't want growl support, and I haven't wanted growl support in a very long time. I've yet to see a use case for it that didn't seem bent on interrupting the user with a distraction, and preventing them from getting things done. Screw that, I'll stick with programs bouncing subtly in the dock, where I can ignore them. (Not to mention, the last time I used growl it (or the programs who used it) suffered from a few bugs which would cause it to occasionally barf notifications all over my screen without warning. How rude!)
albertzeyer 15y ago
So, I would say, let's fork it.
- rgovostes 15y ago
  To save $2 and cheat the developers out of earning something for the work they've put into the program over the past 7 years? It's still open source and you can still compile your own version, but nonetheless the developers deserve a tiny bit of compensation for the work and support they provide.
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    I'm having a hard time figuring out how forking a project placed under the BSD license by its developers can be "cheat"ing those same developers.
    - rgovostes 15y ago
      If the sole purpose of forking is to circumvent the $2 price tag, and not to implement new features yourself, then how is it not cheating them? As I said, you can compile your own copy without forking and without paying. But forking with the sole intention of making easier for others to avoid paying is poor form, if permitted by the license.
      - ceejayoz 15y ago
        It's no more cheating the developers than I'm cheating the government by taking every tax deduction available to me.
      - LiroXIV 15y ago
        It's just BSD
      - neworbit 15y ago
        I contributed based on it being an open source license; if some group decides to change that so they can make money off it, forking and keeping it free is not "cheating them" - it's keeping them from cheating me and every other dev who has helped them.
xal 15y ago
That's good. One of the biggest productivity gains you can have as an OSX user is uninstalling Growl. Being interrupted constantly by stuff that doesn't matter ( Email arrived, iTunes changed song, Download done ) will reduce your ability to focus on the task at hand and all of those things can be processed later and don't need immediate attention.
- sausagefeet 15y ago
  I disabled nearly all the attention getters for apps I use and I haven't looked back.
- MrEnigma 15y ago
  I know people really enjoy not being notified. However for things like email for me, since I need to be reading and up to date on them for work, it's much easier to look to the upper right of your screen and see what it is instead of switching apps and checking to see it's just a 'normal' email you don't need to respond to.
  - gojomo 15y ago
    People also enjoy slot machines and heroin. (Update: FWIW, I believe the parent read "people enjoy being notified", with no 'not', when I wrote this. Not sure if I misread or it was modified.)
    - dextorious 15y ago
      Yes, because not being notified is equivalent of gambling and heroin.
      - gojomo 15y ago
        Actually, being notified at unpredictable intervals, as a bit of random-reward, has effects on the limbic system similar to gambling and drugs. Onscreen notifications let you binge on these little pleasures: enjoyable, yes, but rarely productive. Your strawberries are ready to be harvested!
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
haydenchambers 15y ago
Growl is amazing and deserves any reward it might get from the store.. For those moaning about how invasive it is, change the settings or don't use it. I personally love it and am glad to purchase versions.
MrEnigma 15y ago
I've been using the paid version for the last couple of weeks, and it works equally as well as the old version. However they added a rollup feature, so if you're away it would track them all, but you couldn't remove it. The release a few days allowed you to be able to disable it, which works. However there are still some small bugs (like a notification that got stuck and you couldn't remove). It's really about the same as the old version. The one cool thing they added was the ability to forward growl messages easily over bonjour (auto detection). So if you have two computers, when one is idle, it can forward it's messages to another active computer.
thibaut_barrere 15y ago
Never had an issue with growl "parasiting" my attention. I'm happy to use it for automated tests feedback. I have no issue to pay a few bucks for that to help out on maintenance.
andrewljohnson 15y ago
Really disliked Growl when I had it installed. I wonder why people like it... is there some killer use case, or does it just interrupt your work endlessly with Skype notifications, software updates, and other nonsense? It's bad enough that I keep my GMail open continuously... I've thought about shutting that down for most of the day too.
- watmough 15y ago
  I pretty much just get my wife's IM messages via Adium / Growl. Growl lets me scan them to see if I need to switch workspaces to respond, and if I don't, then I don't break flow. Nothing much else bugs me in Growl on any regular basis.
- egypturnash 15y ago
  The key to making Growl good is to prune what it notifies for. What do you actually care about? Me, I mostly use it as an iTunes track info display, just a little note in the bottom corner of my screen that fades in and out quietly, and reappears when I hit a hotkey. I've also used it to display error messages when debugging an Applescript. There's one guy who uses it to [give himself instant visual feedback when he breaks the build](http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/way-beyond-cool-autotest-growl-doomguy/ http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/way-beyond-cool-autot...). I don't have it notify me with info about every email. I don't have it tell me when someone IMs me. If an app starts spamming me with notifications about something I think is unimportant, I go into Growl's prefs and turn that app off.
  - MrFoof 15y ago
    I agree entirely. I use Growl for exactly one thing: To notify me of deliveries via the Delivery Status widget. Because if I don't act on picking them up quickly, I might have to wait 1 to 2 days to get my package from the office. Everything else? Off, because there's no material benefit for me being notified.
jacobolus 15y ago
The complaints about growl being an impossible distracting productivity suck are overblown, and completely miss the point of growl. The great thing about growl is that it provides one central place to control notifications, adjusting their parameters with fine grained control. If you find some particular type of notification obnoxious, change its behavior or turn it off. If growl didn't exist, every application would provide its own mechanism for notifications, and the user would be left turning off distracting crap in 10 places instead of one, and unable to adjust that one vital notification to behave as desired.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > If you find some particular type of notification obnoxious, change its behavior or turn it off. Exactly. Some notifications are obnoxious, but they're not that common and it's really easy to turn them off application-per-application (you can even configure individual notification types within an application). And growl offers clear, simple and centralized access to configuring notifications.
- llambda 15y ago
  I completely agree. Although with one caveat: I find the new "notification center" to be quite obnoxious and was surprised to find that the only way to turn it off (evidently) was to set the timeout to a very high number (e.g. 999999). Still it's true, the beauty of Growl is the fact that you can easily adjust it to suite your needs. Now if only Skype would update to support GNTP.
  - omfg 15y ago
    There's a checkbox to enable / disable it.
    - AdamGibbins 15y ago
      This was added in a version released this week. Prior to this it was impossible - which I suspect is what the parent is referring to.
- 15y ago
haakon 15y ago
The latest episode of The Basement Coders has interesting coverage of the Growl situation and they interview someone who decided to fork it: http://basementcoders.com/2011/10/episode-47-fork-you-growl-interview-with-perry-metzger/ http://basementcoders.com/2011/10/episode-47-fork-you-growl-...
wavephorm 15y ago
Sorry, this should be a "feature" of the operating system I'm using, not an additional add-on piece of software that I have to purchase.
- jabkobob 15y ago
  I'm so happy that OS X doesn't do notifications. Dock badges are already distracting enough... I always like it when someone gives a talk, attaches his windows laptop to the beamer, and is then constantly distracted by the yellow notifications in the bottom right corner "You are now connected to the internet", "Your virus definitions are out of date", "New hardware detected"...
  - wavephorm 15y ago
    Microsoft Windows did it right, all notifications are standardized and put into the icon tray. If I want to disable notifications I open the tray settings and disable them there. MacOS never standardized anything, and so every MacOS app creates a new non-standard tray icon, with its own notification system, and some of them now use Growl and some of them don't. It's a mess that even Microsoft managed to standardize 10 years ago.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - bonch 15y ago
      Windows notifications are very annoying, and I'm glad OS X doesn't have them. OS X has dock badges to notify the user, and if apps do their own thing because they think a popup just has to interrupt what the user is doing, they are deviating from the system's APIs.
    - jabkobob 15y ago
      Microsoft did it exactly right if you assume popup notifications are necessary. I firmly believe that popup notifications are unnecessary and distracting, and that's why I prefer the "notification system" of OS X (red badges in the dock). These are a standard. Growl and menu bar status icons etc are just useless cruft introduced by developers who don't want to adhere to the standard. I could care less if my OS notifies me that it discovered a new input device, or that someone sent me an email labelled "urgent", or whatever. Of course, OS X is not as clean and notification-free as I'd like it to be: It annoys me every other week or so with some useless software update, and every 10 days it complains that I didn't plug in the backup drive for some time. Now, it might be possible to configure and disable all these notifications, but I just don't want to bother. I want my computer to act on my command, and in my eyes there is almost no excuse for putting up an unexpected notification or alert or dialog for anything.
GameGamer43 15y ago
I like may others was using the free version of growl prior to 1.3. When 1.3 came out I paid the $2 and upgraded as I found the product useful and enjoyed the work the developers put in. Now don't get me wrong, I could have just as easily compiled it on my machine and continued to use it, but that would defeat the purpose of continuing to support something I use daily. With that said, I will say that in 1.3 the roll-up notifications was a true pain to get used to, as there was no way to turn them off. However this has been resolved in 1.3.1 and I urge anyone who didn't enjoy 1.3 to give 1.3.1 a chance.
tezmc 15y ago
I've never wanted growl on my system, and yet somehow it keeps ending up on there without my seeming to have any say in the matter. At least this has given me the reason to uninstall it yet again. I already have enough distractions as it is.
sdfjkl 15y ago
How are new users ever going to try out Growl now? There's no free trial (only an old version that doesn't work well under Lion). I also don't appreciate the way this was pushed to existing users: I got a notification that there is an update for Growl, so I dutifully click on that and promptly get sent to an iTunes store page demanding money. At this point I've disabled Growl to find out how much I really relied on it.
- sdfjkl 15y ago
  A few days later I'm happy to report that I don't miss Growl at all and have completely uninstalled it now. Turns out bouncing dock icons are sufficient to point out when an application wants attention.
xbryanx 15y ago
Uninstalling Growl can also save you some embarrassment. I was interviewing someone last week with my laptop hooked up to a projector (forgot to disable Growl). It took me a while to figure out why someone was giggling. Growl had just broadcast across the bottom of the screen, "From Mint.com: You have exceeded your Fast Food budget for the month."
buff-a 15y ago
Still free for programmers: http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920faf093?pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...
blhack 15y ago
To all of the people in this thread complaining about growl: You realize that you can configure what it alerts you about, yes?
- protomyth 15y ago
  I think the bigger problem for people with Growl is many apps installed it without telling you. This tends to put a bad taste in your mouth.
bane 15y ago
Seriously, how is this not part of the OS yet? Half a dozen different ways to switch between apps, but no built in notification system to tell that I should.
bricestacey 15y ago
I was wary of this change myself, but I was just prompted to upgrade Growl, which linked to http://growl.info/growlupdateavailable http://growl.info/growlupdateavailable and also included a link to source and how to build and install http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-install.php http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-insta... Major props to the Growl team for subsidizing their work while also keeping it free.
liar666 15y ago
This is a well known technique to capture a market: release a free (as in gratis) version and when there the market share is sufficient or the competition killed, make a non-free/gratis release with most-wanted features. Maybe some day people will stop being stupid and understand that Apple is here to make money. If you want reliable software, use free (as in "free speech") software. Or at least OpenSource sofware, you'll always be able to use the latest release!

91 points by avirambm 15y ago

Even though Growl 1.3.0 was distributed via App Store with the same price tag, the source code was published at http://code.google.com/p/growl/source http://code.google.com/p/growl/source. Seems like that practice has stopped as well.

nspragmatic 15y ago
http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920faf093 http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...
- chow 15y ago
  Thank you for posting that; the headline of this story implies that the new version is less free than 1.3.0, which does not seem to be the case.

vertr 15y ago

I've always had a love/hate relationship with growl. Sometimes it just seems a bit excessive and overly distracting. With growl being a paid app now, will developer support wane? Now that I have to buy it, it might be a good reason to stop being distracted by it for me. It would have been a better solution if they released a free stripped down version, and a 'Pro' version with the new toys.

Zev 15y ago
With growl being a paid app now, will developer support wane? If anything, this will help increase core Growl developer support; they actually profit from spending time on Growl now.
- tom9729 15y ago
  I think he was questioning whether developers will continue using Growl notifications.
  - Zev 15y ago
    That isn't how I read his statement, even after reading your reply to me. However.. the SDK is still free, easy to integrate (having done the integration process myself) and users still like it. That last point is, really, the important part here.
    - dreww 15y ago
      since you're being deliberately obtuse, i'll spell it out for you on his behalf. WILL USERS STILL LIKE IT, WHICH IS WHAT GETS DEVELOPER SUPPORT, NOW THAT IT COSTS MONEY?
      - Zev 15y ago
        You know? I had a long post written out. About how I'm actually one of those developers who you're questioning and so on. But, none of that is relevant. The only thing that matters is this: Growl is the #2 app in the entire Mac App Store. It has been in that position since the Growl developers first put it on the App Store weeks ago. The only thing outselling Growl is Mac OS X itself. So, please. The next time you want to accuse someone of being "deliberately obtuse", consider that the person you are talking to might actually know what they're talking about and step back before you make yourself look silly and condescending. :)
    - dextorious 15y ago
      He means THIRD PARTY developers, not Growl developers themselves.
  - vertr 15y ago
    This is what I meant.
zacwest 15y ago
The 1.3 SDK allows for applications to generate Growl notifications without Growl installed. This is called "Mist" and is a new feature of the 1.3 SDK. Thus, Growl becomes the "pro" version of Growl when installed, allowing you to customize the notifications, and the "free" version is the built-in notifications. I think this will, if anything, increase the usage of Growl by third-party developers.
sjs 15y ago
You can deliver Growl support built-in to your app, users just won't be able to customize the appearance and tweak other knobs unless they buy Growl themselves. Seems like a very reasonable compromise to me.

bauchidgw 15y ago

does this mean other apps won't install this attention parasite per default?

yoklov 15y ago
Typically I've found that they ask first, however even that is annoying. I don't want growl support, and I haven't wanted growl support in a very long time. I've yet to see a use case for it that didn't seem bent on interrupting the user with a distraction, and preventing them from getting things done. Screw that, I'll stick with programs bouncing subtly in the dock, where I can ignore them. (Not to mention, the last time I used growl it (or the programs who used it) suffered from a few bugs which would cause it to occasionally barf notifications all over my screen without warning. How rude!)

albertzeyer 15y ago

So, I would say, let's fork it.

rgovostes 15y ago
To save $2 and cheat the developers out of earning something for the work they've put into the program over the past 7 years? It's still open source and you can still compile your own version, but nonetheless the developers deserve a tiny bit of compensation for the work and support they provide.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  I'm having a hard time figuring out how forking a project placed under the BSD license by its developers can be "cheat"ing those same developers.
  - rgovostes 15y ago
    If the sole purpose of forking is to circumvent the $2 price tag, and not to implement new features yourself, then how is it not cheating them? As I said, you can compile your own copy without forking and without paying. But forking with the sole intention of making easier for others to avoid paying is poor form, if permitted by the license.
    - ceejayoz 15y ago
      It's no more cheating the developers than I'm cheating the government by taking every tax deduction available to me.
    - LiroXIV 15y ago
      It's just BSD
    - neworbit 15y ago
      I contributed based on it being an open source license; if some group decides to change that so they can make money off it, forking and keeping it free is not "cheating them" - it's keeping them from cheating me and every other dev who has helped them.

xal 15y ago

That's good. One of the biggest productivity gains you can have as an OSX user is uninstalling Growl. Being interrupted constantly by stuff that doesn't matter ( Email arrived, iTunes changed song, Download done ) will reduce your ability to focus on the task at hand and all of those things can be processed later and don't need immediate attention.

sausagefeet 15y ago
I disabled nearly all the attention getters for apps I use and I haven't looked back.
MrEnigma 15y ago
I know people really enjoy not being notified. However for things like email for me, since I need to be reading and up to date on them for work, it's much easier to look to the upper right of your screen and see what it is instead of switching apps and checking to see it's just a 'normal' email you don't need to respond to.
- gojomo 15y ago
  People also enjoy slot machines and heroin. (Update: FWIW, I believe the parent read "people enjoy being notified", with no 'not', when I wrote this. Not sure if I misread or it was modified.)
  - dextorious 15y ago
    Yes, because not being notified is equivalent of gambling and heroin.
    - gojomo 15y ago
      Actually, being notified at unpredictable intervals, as a bit of random-reward, has effects on the limbic system similar to gambling and drugs. Onscreen notifications let you binge on these little pleasures: enjoyable, yes, but rarely productive. Your strawberries are ready to be harvested!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

haydenchambers 15y ago

Growl is amazing and deserves any reward it might get from the store.. For those moaning about how invasive it is, change the settings or don't use it. I personally love it and am glad to purchase versions.

MrEnigma 15y ago

I've been using the paid version for the last couple of weeks, and it works equally as well as the old version. However they added a rollup feature, so if you're away it would track them all, but you couldn't remove it. The release a few days allowed you to be able to disable it, which works. However there are still some small bugs (like a notification that got stuck and you couldn't remove). It's really about the same as the old version. The one cool thing they added was the ability to forward growl messages easily over bonjour (auto detection). So if you have two computers, when one is idle, it can forward it's messages to another active computer.

thibaut_barrere 15y ago

Never had an issue with growl "parasiting" my attention. I'm happy to use it for automated tests feedback. I have no issue to pay a few bucks for that to help out on maintenance.

andrewljohnson 15y ago

Really disliked Growl when I had it installed. I wonder why people like it... is there some killer use case, or does it just interrupt your work endlessly with Skype notifications, software updates, and other nonsense? It's bad enough that I keep my GMail open continuously... I've thought about shutting that down for most of the day too.

watmough 15y ago
I pretty much just get my wife's IM messages via Adium / Growl. Growl lets me scan them to see if I need to switch workspaces to respond, and if I don't, then I don't break flow. Nothing much else bugs me in Growl on any regular basis.
egypturnash 15y ago
The key to making Growl good is to prune what it notifies for. What do you actually care about? Me, I mostly use it as an iTunes track info display, just a little note in the bottom corner of my screen that fades in and out quietly, and reappears when I hit a hotkey. I've also used it to display error messages when debugging an Applescript. There's one guy who uses it to [give himself instant visual feedback when he breaks the build](http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/way-beyond-cool-autotest-growl-doomguy/ http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/way-beyond-cool-autot...). I don't have it notify me with info about every email. I don't have it tell me when someone IMs me. If an app starts spamming me with notifications about something I think is unimportant, I go into Growl's prefs and turn that app off.
- MrFoof 15y ago
  I agree entirely. I use Growl for exactly one thing: To notify me of deliveries via the Delivery Status widget. Because if I don't act on picking them up quickly, I might have to wait 1 to 2 days to get my package from the office. Everything else? Off, because there's no material benefit for me being notified.

jacobolus 15y ago

The complaints about growl being an impossible distracting productivity suck are overblown, and completely miss the point of growl. The great thing about growl is that it provides one central place to control notifications, adjusting their parameters with fine grained control. If you find some particular type of notification obnoxious, change its behavior or turn it off. If growl didn't exist, every application would provide its own mechanism for notifications, and the user would be left turning off distracting crap in 10 places instead of one, and unable to adjust that one vital notification to behave as desired.

masklinn 15y ago
> If you find some particular type of notification obnoxious, change its behavior or turn it off. Exactly. Some notifications are obnoxious, but they're not that common and it's really easy to turn them off application-per-application (you can even configure individual notification types within an application). And growl offers clear, simple and centralized access to configuring notifications.
llambda 15y ago
I completely agree. Although with one caveat: I find the new "notification center" to be quite obnoxious and was surprised to find that the only way to turn it off (evidently) was to set the timeout to a very high number (e.g. 999999). Still it's true, the beauty of Growl is the fact that you can easily adjust it to suite your needs. Now if only Skype would update to support GNTP.
- omfg 15y ago
  There's a checkbox to enable / disable it.
  - AdamGibbins 15y ago
    This was added in a version released this week. Prior to this it was impossible - which I suspect is what the parent is referring to.
15y ago

haakon 15y ago

The latest episode of The Basement Coders has interesting coverage of the Growl situation and they interview someone who decided to fork it: http://basementcoders.com/2011/10/episode-47-fork-you-growl-interview-with-perry-metzger/ http://basementcoders.com/2011/10/episode-47-fork-you-growl-...

wavephorm 15y ago

Sorry, this should be a "feature" of the operating system I'm using, not an additional add-on piece of software that I have to purchase.

jabkobob 15y ago
I'm so happy that OS X doesn't do notifications. Dock badges are already distracting enough... I always like it when someone gives a talk, attaches his windows laptop to the beamer, and is then constantly distracted by the yellow notifications in the bottom right corner "You are now connected to the internet", "Your virus definitions are out of date", "New hardware detected"...
- wavephorm 15y ago
  Microsoft Windows did it right, all notifications are standardized and put into the icon tray. If I want to disable notifications I open the tray settings and disable them there. MacOS never standardized anything, and so every MacOS app creates a new non-standard tray icon, with its own notification system, and some of them now use Growl and some of them don't. It's a mess that even Microsoft managed to standardize 10 years ago.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - bonch 15y ago
    Windows notifications are very annoying, and I'm glad OS X doesn't have them. OS X has dock badges to notify the user, and if apps do their own thing because they think a popup just has to interrupt what the user is doing, they are deviating from the system's APIs.
  - jabkobob 15y ago
    Microsoft did it exactly right if you assume popup notifications are necessary. I firmly believe that popup notifications are unnecessary and distracting, and that's why I prefer the "notification system" of OS X (red badges in the dock). These are a standard. Growl and menu bar status icons etc are just useless cruft introduced by developers who don't want to adhere to the standard. I could care less if my OS notifies me that it discovered a new input device, or that someone sent me an email labelled "urgent", or whatever. Of course, OS X is not as clean and notification-free as I'd like it to be: It annoys me every other week or so with some useless software update, and every 10 days it complains that I didn't plug in the backup drive for some time. Now, it might be possible to configure and disable all these notifications, but I just don't want to bother. I want my computer to act on my command, and in my eyes there is almost no excuse for putting up an unexpected notification or alert or dialog for anything.

GameGamer43 15y ago

I like may others was using the free version of growl prior to 1.3. When 1.3 came out I paid the $2 and upgraded as I found the product useful and enjoyed the work the developers put in. Now don't get me wrong, I could have just as easily compiled it on my machine and continued to use it, but that would defeat the purpose of continuing to support something I use daily. With that said, I will say that in 1.3 the roll-up notifications was a true pain to get used to, as there was no way to turn them off. However this has been resolved in 1.3.1 and I urge anyone who didn't enjoy 1.3 to give 1.3.1 a chance.

tezmc 15y ago

I've never wanted growl on my system, and yet somehow it keeps ending up on there without my seeming to have any say in the matter. At least this has given me the reason to uninstall it yet again. I already have enough distractions as it is.

sdfjkl 15y ago

How are new users ever going to try out Growl now? There's no free trial (only an old version that doesn't work well under Lion). I also don't appreciate the way this was pushed to existing users: I got a notification that there is an update for Growl, so I dutifully click on that and promptly get sent to an iTunes store page demanding money. At this point I've disabled Growl to find out how much I really relied on it.

sdfjkl 15y ago
A few days later I'm happy to report that I don't miss Growl at all and have completely uninstalled it now. Turns out bouncing dock icons are sufficient to point out when an application wants attention.

xbryanx 15y ago

Uninstalling Growl can also save you some embarrassment. I was interviewing someone last week with my laptop hooked up to a projector (forgot to disable Growl). It took me a while to figure out why someone was giggling. Growl had just broadcast across the bottom of the screen, "From Mint.com: You have exceeded your Fast Food budget for the month."

buff-a 15y ago

Still free for programmers: http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920faf093?pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...

blhack 15y ago

To all of the people in this thread complaining about growl: You realize that you can configure what it alerts you about, yes?

protomyth 15y ago
I think the bigger problem for people with Growl is many apps installed it without telling you. This tends to put a bad taste in your mouth.

bane 15y ago

Seriously, how is this not part of the OS yet? Half a dozen different ways to switch between apps, but no built in notification system to tell that I should.

bricestacey 15y ago

I was wary of this change myself, but I was just prompted to upgrade Growl, which linked to http://growl.info/growlupdateavailable http://growl.info/growlupdateavailable and also included a link to source and how to build and install http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-install.php http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-insta... Major props to the Growl team for subsidizing their work while also keeping it free.

liar666 15y ago

This is a well known technique to capture a market: release a free (as in gratis) version and when there the market share is sufficient or the competition killed, make a non-free/gratis release with most-wanted features. Maybe some day people will stop being stupid and understand that Apple is here to make money. If you want reliable software, use free (as in "free speech") software. Or at least OpenSource sofware, you'll always be able to use the latest release!