Long before iOS 5 introduced Notification Center, The Growl Project was doing something similar on the computer. Now that Notification Center is making the leap to the desktop with OS X Mountain Lion, the creators of Growl are speaking out on their plans for the future.
The Growl Project took to their Posterous blog on Wednesday to discuss Growl and its fate in the wake of Notification Center, one of Apple’s key new features arriving next month with OS X Mountain Lion. With more than 300 developers actively supporting the Growl platform, many have feared that Notification Center would drive Growl into an early grave -- but instead, the project is moving ahead with Growl 2, its biggest update to date.
With the introduction of Growl 1.3, the developers introduced “Mist,” a framework that allowed notifications to appear even when the main app wasn’t running. Beginning with OS X Mountain Lion, Growl will be used if present, with notifications being pushed to Notification Center if not. Mac OS X Snow Leopard and OS X Lion users will instead use Mist by default when Growl isn’t available.
Of course, the biggest news is the forthcoming Growl 2.
“One of the really neat things that we've done is split the action and visual notifications, so that both could fire at the same time,” explains project manager Chris Forsythe. “Let me give you an example of how this would work. You could have a Smoke display, and the MailMe action fire from the same notification if you wanted. This is great and makes things really powerful.
“For Growl 2 we're simply going to add a Notification Center action display as well,” Forysthe adds. “This is going to make it easy for anyone who wants to see notifications in Growl, and also in Notifcation Center. We don't know of any downside to doing this, and see it as sort of a simple yet powerful way to get what you want done. There may be some caveates to doing this that we can talk about once 10.8 is out, but there may not be. We'll all just find out together.”
The blog post doesn’t detail when Growl 2 will be available, but the project makes it clear that Growl will actively support Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion Notification Center, allowing developers to “transition from Growl to Notification Center on their terms.” Great news for Growl lovers everywhere ahead of the July launch of OS X Mountain Lion!
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choiceweb
June 13, 2012 at 1:34pm
I like Growl and have used it for some time. I did though refuse to upgrade it and download it from the App store because the program was constantly badgering me to do so. I get that they need to make money just like anyone else, but they went about it in an obnoxious way.
