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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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