Growl 1.3.1 is out, no longer free | Hacker News Reader

Growl 1.3.1 is out, no longer free

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91 pointsavirambm99 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

There's a checkbox to enable / disable it.

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.

Seems like something that should be built into the OS. It's a feature not a product. Why isn't it just built in?

Because many people find animated notifications from apps they're not using horribly annoying.

If it was built in properly, you'd be able to configure which apps are allowed to send notifications etc.

You can do that with Growl right now. Also, users that don't like it don't even have to consider it if it's 3rd party. I see no problem with the current system. Apple has had a million chances to buy Growl and never has, it's not going to happen.

I don't really understand why they would buy Growl. It wouldn't take long for them to add in to OSX themselves.

Many third-party applications use Growl for notifications. Buying Growl and maintaining the API would mean that Mac OS X Margay's exciting new Notification Centre feature would have instant support across a wide number of apps.

The actual cost of buying Growl is negligible to Apple.

It's Apple. All they have to do is issue a beta and they'll have plenty of people writing to the new API.

The cost of buying Growl isn't just the dollars used to take ownership of the company. You have to integrate the people and the code. For a feature as small as this, it's just plain easier to implement internally.

I'd bet that now that iOS has notifications, it'll show up in a future version of OS X

In my eyes, configuring growl and tweaking notification settings are part of the "impossibly distracting productivity suck". I feel that configuring notifications is a total waste of time, when I can just turn them off.

>If growl didn't exist, every application would provide its own mechanism for notifications

As I see it now, as a developer, growl doesn't exist anymore. I loved using it both as a user to receive notification and as a developer to send them to users, but I now I feel there is no way I can rely on it anymore.

Even if I was selling my software instead of giving it away, I'd have a hard time asking users to swallow that pill "oh, now go buy this other thing to make my software work".

Growl could offer (for a reasonable license fee) a version of the Growl framework that works regardless of whether the user has the "full" version of Growl installed on their computer.

Users could buy Growl from the App store for a way to centrally manage notifications, change the notification style, send notifications between computers, etc.

Could? This is literally exactly what Growl 1.3 does.

Wait, really? That's great, and it seems like it solves the parent's problem.

Where is that documented? I can't find anything on the website.

It's called Mist inside the framework. I'm yelling at the Growl folks to make it more obvious to users, but it's documented at http://growl.info/documentation/developer/implementing-growl...

(As that is what they're doing) I'm sure its a smart business strategy for Growl, because it maintains Growl's momentum and developers have less reason to seek alternatives and introducing those alternatives to the users.

But its just not something I'm comfortable shipping.

No they don’t. Some people genuinely hate notifications. I do, for example. That’s a valid reason for not liking Growl, configurability doesn’t figure into it.

If those who hate Growl were to claim that everyone should hate Growl they would certainly be wrong – but that’s a different point.

I think you missed parent's point. If you hate notifications, Growl is good because it lets you disable them all easily, instead of having to disable them in each application.

I find Growl notifications really easy to tune out and ignore when I don't want to pay attention to them, but like having them there if I'm waiting on some incoming message, transfer completion, backup notification, etc.

I definitely find them a lot less obnoxious than a bouncing dock icon, probably due to their location and the fact that they go away after a few seconds.

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.

I disabled nearly all the attention getters for apps I use and I haven't looked back.

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.

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.)

Yes, because not being notified is equivalent of gambling and heroin.

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!

Also to keep in mind: if you downvote this, you are probably an addict in denial! Our 12-click program is arranging meetings now in major tech hubs, check meetup.com for all the details.

For email and events, I don't really need another piece of software. Chrome offers desktop notifications for webapps & extensions (e.g Gmail & Google Calendar).

I have to agree.

Having been using Growl for years, I mechanically went to buy it on the Mac App Store when 1.3 was released. To make sure the upgrade was clean, I first uninstalled the 1.2.2 version I had on my system… only to realized I could not install the new version, since I am still running Snow Leopard.

I did not reinstall Growl, and I am very happy with my system as it is. I had already disabled some notifications before, such as Adium messages showing up on my screen, but I still had some, like the name of the new song playing. All this noise is now removed and it is great.

I can see how Growl can have its uses though. Sometimes, you need to wait for a long process to finish in order to perform the next action (e.g. wait for a long download, deployment, or software build). Or for alerts of a monitoring system, where you would really like to be interrupted. I may reinstall it when I have such use cases, but enabling only the minimum number of notifications.

> Email arrived, iTunes changed song, Download done

Most of these are not even enabled by default (Mail and iTunes are not growl-enabled so you need to enable a separate addon to handle them), and are trivial to disable (a checkbox in the Growl preference pane)

If that is your "biggest productivity gain" as an OSX user, I'm sorry to say you're just an idiot.

Although I agree that this does not seem like a big deal, your tone reads as very hostile. We should strive for a higher standard at HN.

> We should strive for a higher standard at HN.

You can't strive for a higher standard when there is no higher standard to strive for: sometimes, a person is being an idiot and refusing to use the right word is just misplaced political correctness.

Misplaced political correctness? No sir, it's politeness. It's treating other people decently. It's acting like a mature adult rather than an angry, uncultured teenager. Bluntness just for bluntness' sake is what's misplaced in polite conversation.

Totally agree. Another thing that has helped me a lot is turning off the unread email count badge in Mail.app.

Actually I use Growl (and libnotify on Linux) for a very specific set of notifications I want to be notified of. Everything else doesn't apply.

For me, it's more distracting to see the new email count tick up and be left wondering whether I care about what I just received (until I bring up my mail to find out).

Notifications let me know what's going on right up front (and if I don't want to be distracted, I can always close my email completely).

I'm all for turning off “iTunes changed song”-type notifications.

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. Seems like that practice has stopped as well.

http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...

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.

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.

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."

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-...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's no more cheating the developers than I'm cheating the government by taking every tax deduction available to me.

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.

From another comment here, it seems they are discontinuing the open development, so further features wouldn't be open source anymore.

I'm quite sure that other people have already helped out at the source code. That is the point of being open source.

Anyway, I think that such a basic and central application for MacOSX should always be free and open. And if it is not free or not open anymore, the logical consequence would be to have an alternative project for this kind of application. And it would be a logical consequence to base this new project on Growl.

Thus, a fork.

I don't know which comment that you are referring to but it is incorrect. I personally confirmed with the project lead that they have no intention of "discontinuing open development."

Growl remains free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer if you're willing to compile it yourself. The $2 fee only applies if you obtain the app through the Mac App Store, of which a mere $1.39 goes to the project's developers.

I meant that comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203473

So where is the code of 1.3.1? Even when it will be released once, why not immediately? With 'open development', I also really mean open development, as in other open source projects.

Anyway, as others said, this is still not an option, it still should be free. For example, in my own free and open applications which depends on Growl, I would distribute a free copy of Growl now because I want my users to be able to use it for free. And that goes for most Growl-using applications.

Normally I'd agree - but in this case Growl being commercial means that your software (that depends on Growl), now effectively costs more than before.

I would not integrate with Growl at this point because I do not believe in nickel-and-diming people and gotchas, but that is exactly what people would find if they boot up my app and discover they need to pay $X for full functionality.

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.

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.

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-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!)

I was wary of this change myself, but I was just prompted to upgrade Growl, which linked to http://growl.info/growlupdateavailable and also included a link to source and how to build and install http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-insta...

Major props to the Growl team for subsidizing their work while also keeping it free.

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!

Still free for programmers: http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...

To all of the people in this thread complaining about growl:

You realize that you can configure what it alerts you about, yes?

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.

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.

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"...

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.

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.

Actually, it should be a feature of the graphical (or non graphical) environment you are in, not the underlying OS. The OS should not be concerned with how or what things appear on a screen.

Yes if you need that sort of clarification I was referring to the MacOSX "graphical environment".

You're confusing OS with the kernel. The graphical environment is part of the OS.

EDIT: is -> is (often)

You are confusing OS with the userland. Graphical environment is not necessarily a part of the OS. If you run Linux you can load a number of different graphical environments.

If I use Linux I can load a number of different filesystems. Are these not part of the OS?

While the OS doesn't necessarily have to distribute a graphical environment, it can and it is often a feature of the OS, unlike what rbanffy said.

I've edited my post above.

I'd just like to point out that this sort of pedantry is kind of pathetic.

> If I use Linux I can load a number of different filesystems. Are these not part of the OS?

Actually, most filesystems are part of the kernel. There is the FUSE mechanism, on which you can attach user-space file systems. Filesystem drivers attached in such way are usually (unless you are doing something wrong) portable across OSs that share similar mechanisms and, as the name implies, are withing the user space. not OS-space.

> it is often a feature of the OS

Much like tires are a feature of a car. The fact you bought them together does not mean they are the same object. A tire is not a car much like a GUI is not an OS.

Never said they were the same thing. My original post was "is part of the OS".

OS space

Again, that's kernel space. OS is something bigger. Debian is an OS. GNU/Linux is an OS. Linux by itself isn't.

I find the term Operating System mostly outdated these days when all common OSes ship with wide array of applications, some which are essential for the system to function, and others less so.

Funny you say that. I have distinct memories of running Gnome on top of Linux, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. I even remember running a somewhat early version on IRIX and on MkLinux.

I must be mistaken.

I never said it had to be exclusive to one OS.

But wouldn't that mean it's no more part of the underlying OS as Keynote is not part of OSX?

I can use the FreeBSD kernel in FreeBSD and Debian. Is the kernel not part of the FreeBSD OS?

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.

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.

I think he was questioning whether developers will continue using Growl notifications.

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.

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?

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. :)

He means THIRD PARTY developers, not Growl developers themselves.

This is what I meant.

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.

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.

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