Growl in Retirement
336699.org
336699.org
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.
Note that Apple has dropped hints that they’d like users to move from macOS to iOS (“what’s a computer?”). Third party developers can’t build anything like Growl on iOS. There are a lot of reasons I don’t think Apple will ever be able to replace macOS with a closed system like iOS, but at least one of them is simply that a system as closed as iOS will inherently have a low ceiling for innovation (not enough room to innovate on the platform) therefore this innovation will be channeled into other platforms.
In other words, I think developers building features like Growl for macOS is highly relevant to the success of M1 Macs.
Since iOS 8 the system has had most of that functionality baked-in or is officially supported by Apple’s APIs for third-party devs. The only real things I feel I’m missing out right now on iOS 14 is raw FS access and easy sideloading.
> easy sideloading
Workaround available. [1]
Unless you jailbroke your iPhone 2G and 3G that's an impossibility: the iPhone has never officially supported USB Mass Storage mode: it has always only ever officially supported MTP/PTP (and DFU) over USB.
Sure, sometimes a 3rd party comes along and makes a great product that once it is used, it feels like it is just something that should have always been there. Apple being Apple, they are going to want full control, so if they can't acquire the tool to do what they want, you know they will develop it internally. Every tech company does this. FB/Snap/Insta/etc have all borrowed/stolen/re-implemented.
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 know.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/search?q=mac&restrict_sr=o...
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.
Thing is I build PC's for both gaming and software development and frankly for that goal the delta between build it yourself and someone else building just on price is pretty large but there is also the fact that if I build it myself I know exactly which parts are in there.
If an acquisition is rejected/infeasible/not applicable/etc, then I'm not clear on the right thing to do. Acquisition might have been possible with Growl, but for some other cases there's not even a company to acquire. Have any other big platforms done this well?
(Apple's acquisition of Workflow which became Shortcuts seems like a case where they did this well)
If Apple were able to copy some app and in return mention your name as a co-author of some sort/tip you - that would probably be a life changing experience for most developers out there.
Losing your income stream certainly is life-changing.
How would Apple admitting they did it change your life for the better?
When you say "tip you", are you thinking "compensate you for all future lost sales and throw in an extra million or two"?
The MacOS community, and I think many MacOS developers accept that 'sherlocking' is a thing and I see it as something that should be a point of pride for these developers: "we built something so good that Apple decided to rip it off" one oft cited Steve Jobs (through Picaso) quote of course being "good artists copy, great artists steal". But I do understand developers who are frustrated by this happening to their apps, and don't begrudge them for it, especially when it is their source of income.
I've recently come to a shift on mentality and believe that such sentiments are meaningless. It's almost always the most parasitic and immoral of the players that succeed and continue to succeed. The worse they can treat the other parties, generally the better off they are. It's like a deer telling a lion it should consider eating more grass.
Yeah it sucks cause we're generally in the camp that is being taken advantage of. But due to the forces of capitalism and human nature, you can practically mathematically prove that your words will not be heeded, and to great great profit.
I think it actually goes a little further. Growl is (was) a fantastic notifications system, but it wouldn't have succeeded without the healthy ecosystem of third-party programs that were willing to use it. When I installed it, long long ago, everything I wanted notifications from suddenly supported them. If the developers hadn't been talking to each other, it wouldn't have worked.
I mean, Toast notifications weren't even invented by Growl. It was nice software but this seems like hyperbole lol
Edit: also, IIRC Growl was originally called "Notification Center", which is the name that Apple later used for their implementation of similar features
Double edit: I should've RTFA which mentions my fun fact
If so, I think its developers can’t be completely unhappy about the end result. Also, their code is (3-clause) BSD licensed. If the product lives on in spirit, does it really matter where the code came from?
https://www.osnews.com/story/15442/interview-with-chris-fors...
Growl started around 2003 really
Does MSN Messenger get the credit for that?
Growl and a particular packaging software that provides auto updates had basically become a prerequisite for Mac apps at a certain point.
Something like Growl, or f.lux (mentioned down-thread) could never have come about if macOS had been as restrictive as iOS. I have little doubt that we’ve missed at least a few such innovations over past decade, especially on the iPad, due to this.
While the Mac will likely never, despite some tireless predictions, go fully locked-down, little things like the deprecation of kernel extensions will chip away at this from the Mac side as well. Market-driven innovation and platform control are a difficult balance, but they are ultimately a zero-sum game.
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25243710
So technically, how do they differentiate the traffic?
Not sure though how they differentiate the traffic. There are "access points" set up which I presume are used for either connection. In my case they are the same but I seem to remember on an older phone they used to be different. It was also a different provider. I'm also not sure how they would detect that they're changed.
Screenshot of my setup: https://imgur.com/a/xH88Itp
I thought that's an Android internal thing to decide which of several APNs to use.
Also the first 2 references that Google returns say dun is obsolete and not in use with today's devices. I believe that belongs to the ATD *99# era
(Havent't worked in the field for 10+ years, could be wrong.)
You give me internet on device X. How is it up to you how I use it?
If you're shitty enough person (good businessman) you can profit off of anything.
They did the opposite with music (they actually sold simple standard mp3s, unlike what you get from iTunes) because they were challengers, not incumbents, so the priority was to attract users.
I assure you that they care much more about you buying books from them than about "lock-in" from you using their apps and buying their devices. Proof: their apps absolutely suck and their devices are not much better. The devices exist to get you to buy more books from them. It is absolutely not a side-effect that their DRM satisfies publishers.
In my opinion the biggest fear of those business development teams is to be treated as or thought of just as providing internet on a device. As being just the pipe is not considered a lucrative market, and open to lots of competition where the race is to the bottom on price. This is also where you get lots of the anti-competitive behaviors, like not investing the effort to make a competitors service optimal within a network, as the carriers would rather launch their own service instead of making someone elses service they don't generate revenue off of work great.
To be fair, in the older gen access technologies, all internet access isn't equal. The access network was optimized for the usage patterns of a mobile browser, in the way it scheduled and idled the radio (I'm glossing over a large number of details). So connecting a computer via tethering that behaves differently and is far more chatty on the network, is actually a much costlier device to support. The current gen techs like LTE do operate much differently, to support chatty devices and apps. With a better optimized network and devices loaded with chatty apps, this difference is probably disappearing.
So if you put yourself in the shoes of a business dev person at a wireless carrier. They'll look at this and say, well we can have a $40 plan for just internet access. Or we can have a $35 plan for just mobile browsing, since that's more efficient and allows us to be more competitive when using the phones browser, and a $15 add on for tethering for those who want it and cost the company more. There are entire teams dedicated to just figuring this stuff out.
And this leads to some of the stuff I would get thrown from time to time, like the $60k bills (no longer allowed in canada, a rule was created to prevent surprise bills, but used to be a thing) when someone bought unlimited mobile browser for $7, and thought that meant unlimited usage for their tethered computer and started torrenting all day which was pay per use.
An unlimited $7 plan only works in the context of the way a user can use a mobile browser, and that's why the carriers think they can dictate how you use the internet connection. They have departments to tailor make plans that only work if they're able to dictate how the internet is used.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this model, I'm just trying to explain where I believe this perspective comes from based on my experience. I've been out of the industry several years now, and my opinions are my own.
One group was trying to monetize services which were already free. Like make a list of data provided by stock mobile runtimes (Android, iOS), such as location data, and then create a developer portal for accessing that same data thru web services.
I'm having trouble remembering the details because I didn't even understand it at the time. My buddies were contractors, loved this kind of work, the money was good, and you could never fail. They thought there were helping me, get me some cheddar too.
I was briefly on the "mobile app services" team, it took me about 3 months to figure out what we were even doing. But there were lots and lots of meetings. Convened by empire builders and corporate climbers. Expensive suits. And lots of agile, kanban, scrum masters, velocity. To build something biggly impressive for which there would never be customers or revenue.
I assume there was at least one other group trying to "accomplish" the same thing.
The carriers would print money forever if they simply fired everyone unrelated to the actual network (cables and towers) and charged everyone a flat rate. And some overhead of the basic infrastructure services like provisioning numbers and 911.
No metering, no discounts, no custom phones, no carrier add-ons. The actual effort to create additional income streams was ridiculously wasteful.
It was crazy making. The actual features that would be awesome were never part of the conversation. For instance, I'd love to hear my voice mails on my laptop. I'm sure enterprise customers would love some tools for managing fleets of phones. Etc.
Maybe the carriers got high from the SMS profiteering, didn't realize that was a one-off bonanza, and have never recovered.
> The carriers would print money forever if they simply fired everyone unrelated to the actual network (cables and towers) and charged everyone a flat rate. And some overhead of the basic infrastructure services like provisioning numbers and 911.
In my experience with these projects, I'm not sure it's safe to conclude that they add up to enough to significantly change the economics of the network. I know working on the projects feels like a huge waste of time and energy, but we're talking a million dollars here and there, when the cables, towers, and core people are spending 500 million plus per year. I'm sure it adds up, but all businesses have overhead, and I don't see it as a game changer.
As for charging a flat rate, I'm actually of the opposite perspective. I realize it's probably unpopular for this community, but for a long time I've been an advocate that mobile usage should be metered by use. The problem I have with the flat rates, is the users who use less always end up subsidizing the power users who use significantly more. Much of the network investment goes into supporting the top end users, but it's everyone else who has to pay for it. For wireline access this might be a bit different roi calculation, but for mobile wireless I think this is a real economics problem, and flat rate is not an incentive for a carrier to support or retain a power user who wants to use lots of data.
So personally I prefer a model that works more like electricity usage or filling a gas tank, where you pay for what you use, and you naturally get a feel for watching 4k video all day costs more. This of course needs the tools in place to understand where the usage is coming from, not to surprise anyone, etc, etc, so it's not a perfect model, but compared to years ago and the rates that could be offered, it seems atleast to me like a more natural model.
- The fees weren't disproportionate with respect to any infrastructure investments. Why should my internet bill triple over the span of a few years while speeds decrease unless I call, wait on hold for a day, and ask to cancel service?
- There weren't an aspect of double dipping -- why are we being charged for peak bandwidth (with absolutely no guarantee of reaching those speeds) and _also_ being charged for exceeding bandwidth caps equivalent to a few dozen minutes of full use? Why is that "extra" bandwidth more expensive than buying several extra full internet plans?
- It didn't open the door to metering different content sources differently based on the ISP's monopolistic whims.
There are physical bandwidth limits, and those need to be allocated somehow, but the status quo isn't great.
Maybe in the US. In Europe carriers never had any say about what functionality a mobile device offered.
All they provided was a SIM-card for that device.
We’ve never had carrier-branded phones. Not one. Only thing sold has been generic phones which accepts a generic SIM.
And that’s how the market is supposed to work. Free competition on devices. Free competition on service. Customers can combine as they like.
Granted you could buy carrier-locked phones rebated through a contract, but the carrier lock was time-limited and reversible and the phone was a generic, international model.
Carrier-branded phones was definitely not a EU-wide phenomenon.
If anything the introduction of the iPhone in Europe (launched using the very confusing US carrier-model) was what started pushing carriers into attempting to making new restrictions on how people were allowed to use their (formerly unrestricted) subscriptions.
So you got it pretty much 100% backwards.
In the UK there were DEFINITELY carrier branded phones, tethering was disabled by many carriers, and you couldn't even use a regular SIM card in a non-phone device - you needed a "data sim".
I travelled around Europe for 2 years using local SIM cards - and also encountered carriers which disabled tethering.
There were even android apps specifically to work around these tethering restrictions, by making the phone act as a proxy.
The answer is money. Tethering was usually not allowed but you could buy in. You get phones for free, but only if you pay 40€+ a month for the next 2 years for something you actually don't need. E.g. some unlimited services (streaming) while your general data is capped.
I haven't been in the market for such contracts for quite a few years, this has changed a lot in recent times due to "contract-less" cheap providers gobbling up the marketshare. And these packages always disappeared over time and became standard. I don't think tethering is not allowed anywhere anymore.
Source: read the fine print on an offer from my provider, Bouygues Telecom.
My regular plan has 40 GB, which I can use on the phone or tethered. This summer I was spending a lot of time at my parent's and their land internet connection was spotty. At the same time, Bouygues ran a campaign where I could get an extra 20 GB for next to nothing, so I was considering that. Read the fine print which basically said "the allowance doesn't apply to tethered use". I didn't care enough to challenge them on this so I passed.
Edit: Just checked the available options, this is still the case. Can't give a direct link for some reason, so here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/rQgoz0m
Basically this is an option for "unlimited internet on the weekends". The originally hidden disclaimer says, among other things, "except for modem mode".
Not so, unfortunately. I tried putting a phone SIM into an iPad, and soon got a message from the mobile company saying the SIM card wasn’t intended for this use and would be disabled until it went back into a phone.
(This was in the UK a few years ago with a Three PAYG SIM).
They used to proxy all traffic and the only way to get out of their stupid slow proxy was to go to the shop with ID to get on an "18+" list.
They said it was because of some UK law but I was in Ireland. So not applicable. And other UK based providers like Vodafone didn't have this stupidity.
not really. a few years ago, before the eu roaming was made cheap, i bought a sim from wind operator in italy, and it was blocking my tethered traffic. i had to "fix" my ttl for it to work
Admittedly the pool of developers was restricted to those who were able and cared to jailbreak...
Think about it: Apple already had an awesome CPU, but hardly anybody noticed, because iPad OS is so limited.
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 where you even got that from?
Growl was inspired from being project manager on Adium and worked with the people making colloquy. The devs on colloquy were working on notifications and so we’re we and I thought it was smarter to make it a separate tool.
Anyway, Growl did much more than that, and I don’t think there is any doubt Apple’s current implementation owes a lot to your design.
Just because there are some non-obvious great design innovations out there, doesn't mean every little interface component is one. Some things are just the logical solution to a problem.
Growl had so much configurability, so many options, it's not like Apple implemented really any of that!
I was using NeXT OS, which is what later became OS X, circa 1990. Growl apparently launched in 2003. So that's a minimum of 13 years that something "obvious" was missed. And it's probably more fair to count from the mid-1980s, when GUIs first started becoming popular. That doesn't sound obvious to me.
Most things are obvious in retrospect. But it's a mistake to confuse your after-the-fact perspective for what was going on at the time. (For those who are interested, Dekker's "Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" is a great look at how subtle and dangerous that confusion can be.)
Timing is a factor, too. For such a thing to be successful, you also need a OS/hardware combo that can draw the notification without slowing down using the main window (rules out early Mac OS) and users who think the added distraction of notifications is worth it. I would that added distraction goes down with screen size. I doubt it would have been a success on 640×480 displays, for example.
Also, Apple had something similar in 1997 or 1999, with Mac OS 8 or 9.
Obviously then it was then extended for things like a long process completing, etc.
But back in 1990 or 1995, there's wasn't a need for something like Growl. Your e-mail inbox and the occasional beep and modal dialog did the job just fine.
To counter your "most things are obvious in retrospect" philosophy, you might be interested in the "multiple discovery" viewpoint [1] which says precisely the opposite -- that, extended to design, essentially says that the need for a solution becomes obvious to people at about the same time, and that people will solve it in similar ways because they're facing the same constraints.
I also don't think multiple discovery is much of a counter to "most things are obvious in retrospect". Yes, design problems can get solved in similar ways by different people. But obvious-in-retrospect thinking is a cognitive error, where we presume that what's obvious to us is obvious to people in different times and conditions.
Also oftentime there is zero extra space in the menu bar.
Alerts and notifications have followed a pop-up pattern since basically forever in computing.
Emacs displays little notes in the echo area at the bottom of the screen, though those are always (?) triggered by user actions and do not come from background activity. Which also qualifies as "since basically forever", I would say.
I was designing a mobile paint app for example and had to make choices like how you bring up the colour picker, move layers, change tools, preview brush settings etc. There's only so many ways to do certain things on a tiny screen.
QS circa 2008ish spoiled me for all launchers since.
Same. I (or somebody else) really should port Quicksilver to Linux; it's the day-to-day utility I've missed the most.
It's a pretty young company / product but I see great awesome first party integrations instead of unreliable hacky 3rd party scripts which was the default on alfred/packal median of plugins tbh. (As much as I loved 'em and toying with them)
Raycast integrations with for example another awesome tool (Linear.app for PM) Github Issues or Jira if you or your company feel the necessity to put yourself thorugh such painfully useless endeavour lol)
PS: When looking for alfred scripts the other day for a co-worker which did a clean install after recommending it to swap spotlight, packal returned pretty ugly errors when running any search keyword on the site, doesn't seem that well maintained either... so
Granted, a lot of the is now doable with specialized apps, but to no longer have so flexible and versatile a tool makes me sad.
I can’t build demos at the moment, as my Mac has been in the shop with Apple for almost a month now with precious little communication—but that’s another rant entirely.
These posts were written decades ago:
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS.
> And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.
It keeps happening over and over again!
Developing for Linux leaves you with a smaller range of users than Windows and Mac.
https://www.compoundtheory.com/some-arguments-against-linux-...
https://blog.hiri.com/a-year-on-our-experience-launching-a-p...
"Pricing wise, we haven’t noticed anything that distinguishes Linux users from everyone else. They are no more cost conscious than Mac / Windows users. They are definitely willing to pay for software."
As an on-again/off-again linux user, I have paid for software or donated to many projects and it seems others are willing to do the same, however it is still a much much smaller group.
If you want to sell software for money, Linux app development is not the right business to be in.
It's because the users are there. It's similar to things like YouTube. Every YouTuber complains about YouTube... but there is no other place where their random video is going to be recommended to a million strangers. (Twitch is similar.) So, they put up with it.
It boils down to what problem you want to solve. If you can figure out how to convince Mac users to switch to Linux, then you can be successful in your approach of "ditch Apple for being evil" or whatever. If you can't, then you have to find a new line of work (there is plenty of software engineering to be done that never touches an Apple product), or you have to put up with the poor developer experience.
It's also unlikely to be sunshine and roses on the other side of the fence. For everything that's bad about platform X, platform Y probably has just as many annoyances. If you're looking for perfection, you're going to have to remake the world in your image from scratch. That's a lot of work!
I’d just like to pop up a notification programmatically via a bash script. :)
I _think_ when Growl came out it was an open-source implementation of a notification UX that Apple had already demoed, either as a prototype or in some first-party apps, but it's just a vague memory. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
So the basic design of the notification UI (small pop-up window, short and long, icon on the left, click to respond) was already in iChat. Other chat clients for Mac (Adium, Colloquy) were trying to imitate it, as I recall (and ended up improving on it).
This is also interesting on Growl's early history: https://web.archive.org/web/20060115015145/http://www.drunke...
It doesn't matter when some developers condone the forces that take advantage of them because of incentives(stockholders) or general apathy.
I actually really truly hope this happens. I want to see the same sort of love macOS gets from developers, showered on some/any open source OS (e.g. on some Linux/FreeBSD/etc distro).
I've been using Linux for nearly two decades, since I was 12 years old. (I still remember the excitement of installing Linux dual boot on my parents' PC years ago.)
I've been wishing and waiting for the age of the Linux desktop to come. It feels like it's so close, yet so far away.
(I've also been contemplating the benefit of me sinking the time into creating yet-another distro of my own -- one that's a lot different, built upon the features from NixOS and GoboLinux -- a distro that can hopefully be a truly compelling OS to wide range of folks...)
I've been thinking about this recently I'm not not sure the (vocal) Linux community would accept what it might take.
* Developers want to work on projects that interest them and provide a benefit to others.
* However, developers also want to make a good living so they need an audience willing to pay money and make it worth the time it takes to polish something to a decent finish.
* Some developers would prefer to keep their code closed-source.
(Again the vocal) Linux community all to often comes across as everything should be not only be free open-source also free to buy - it's almost a dirty word if you charge for software.
Additionally on the Apple-side of things:
* There's a culture of what constitutes a good app, it drives a certain perfectionism to the final polish that you rarely see in linux desktop apps. Personally I've not seen a huge amount of apps on linux that cater for different user audiences. As technical aware users we vastly over-estimate the amount of technical knowledge and patience an average user has to figure something out.
* Apple is now offering an audience from a multitude of devices. You can build your app for a watch, phone, tablet or desktop. e.g. if someone buys your app on the iPhone they are more likely to be interested in your apps for other devices so there's more opportunity to cross-sell.
Ubuntu is probably the closest I see to being able to set some proper direction here. But I've yet to see them double-down and really set their mind to it, they seem to set a direction hold for while then back-down and go another direction. From the outside, it seems like anytime they've really tried to do something different or _the horror_ make some money it seems to just rile up the vocal linux community.
In a somewhat similar nostalgic vein, I remember haxies…
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Haxie
…and as linked in the blog post, Adium.
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.)
- (BOOL)verifyLicenseData:(NSData *)data
{
return YES;
}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
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
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.
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.
Anyone know why support for Matrix was never added to Adium? I never quite understood that given its robust support for XMPP.
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.
Notification Center was an OS X Mountain Lion feature, wasn't it? That came out in 2012…
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.
You don’t even need an app; you can show a dialog from AppleScript. Using a shell:
/usr/bin/osascript -e 'display notification "whatever"'
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
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!
... Being a tech geek means my nostalgia memories are 'weird' by normal standards.
Super happy now thinking about the time I first installed Growl
Meanwhile, today’s Apple gives us something that doesn’t even show you where notification buttons are.
Here's to hoping for a future for HardwareGrowler still.
Couldn’t someone write a Growl-compatible layer which is a shim to Apple’s Notification Center?
Thanks for all the work that was done - it was well appreciated.
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.
No, but if you don’t then the post is just not relevant to you.
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”.
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.
You don’t need to allow notifications from random apps to make them work for you:
your-long-running-script && osascript -e 'display notification "Done"' || osascript -e 'display notification "There was an error!"'The issue today is that every application now offers notifications, and only some of them are useful. So disable the ones you don't need.
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.
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.
Similarly the mass market of users care less about pimping their ride (so to speak), as getting their work done. Thus little is gained by rearranging your display or initialization subsystem.
One of the key things I find attractive about MacOS is that design is more than skin deep or an ad-hoc assemblage loosely related libraries. Meaning that visual design, architectural design, APIs, and even silicon co-designed makes for better systems.
When I found OS X open source folks they were beyond welcoming. This is one of the bigger reasons Growl was on os x and not Linux.