Ondrej Holzman With the unexpected introduction of the new Mountain Lion operating system, the developers of the popular Growl notification system must have had a hard time. Apple has decided to transfer the Notification Center from iOS to its computers, making it a direct competitor for independent developers since the summer. And what about Growl?
Growl is hugely popular on Macs. So we can't expect developers to give up without a fight. There is this app in the Mac App Store costing $2 the eleventh most downloaded, if we do not count Apple software, it is even the fourth. The user base of the application with the tiger paw in the logo is large, so there is something to build on.
I'm sure most of you also use Growl - whether for notifications about incoming mail, about a new message in the IM client, or to display the currently playing song in iTunes. Growl, which notifies users with "pop-up bubbles," is integrated into many popular Mac apps, and following a recent major update that she came last fall, plus it keeps a history of all notifications, so you won't miss any more. Here, the developers were undoubtedly inspired by the iOS system and its notifications, with which Apple is now preparing to strike back on computers.
However, the developers of Growl report that this definitely does not mean the end of them. On the other hand, they want to improve the notification system in Mountain Lion even more:
“Growl lives on. We are still actively working on two future versions. From the latest reports, we noticed that the Notification Center is only available for apps from the Mac App Store, which cuts off a whole range of other apps that can't be in the Mac App Store or simply aren't there.
We are exploring the possibilities of how we could integrate Growl into the Notification Center. It's too early to draw conclusions, but we expect to find some solution to bring the two systems together so that it's usable for both users and developers. We want developers to have as little trouble as possible when adding notifications to their apps on 10.6 – 10.8.”
Growl will certainly build on applications that are not in the Mac App Store for any reason. Until Apple cracks down on installing them (which would be a different song), Growl will still be the only solution for many apps. In addition, the developers are constantly working with those titles that are already in the software store in order to have the best possible starting position before the summer launch of Mountain Lion. After that, the question will be what solution the individual teams will resort to - whether they will use system notifications or those from Growl.
It is certain that Growl has several advantages over the Notification Center - for example, you can set how the pop-up bubbles will look or how long they will be displayed. With Apple's traditionally conservative approach, we can't assume that its Notification Center will get similar setting options, so we can already see that if developers manage to integrate Growl into the Notification Center, it will only be good for end users.
The fact that this is possible was already convinced by a developer with the nickname Collect3, who released the utility Elevator in the building, which sends all notifications from Growl directly to the Notification Center. Let's not condemn Growl, on the contrary, we can look forward to what the expected versions 1.4 and 2.0 will bring.
Hmm I've been looking forward to NC all along, but I just realized I have the dock on the right side. Can you please upload a picture of what it will look like with the dock on the right?
Thank you ;) it's a shame I didn't know Growl :)))
Growl messages can be displayed in NC using the hiss application. http://collect3.com.au/hiss/