Growl in Retirement (opens in new tab)

There’s one issue, which is that of “Sherlocking” a third-party solution with a first-party implementation. Then there’s another, which is having an open enough system to support such innovations in the first place.

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.

> These are real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side.

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.

How should Apple have handled this? Maybe insisted on acquiring the Growl company? I don't think Apple should have just avoided building Notification Center, since that's a big net benefit for everyone.

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)

Do people get tweak-y with their systems as much any more?

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.)

I still have yet to find a satisfactory replacement for Quicksilver. Yes, Alfred and all those exist. They are mere shades by comparison.

Hopefully Linux will be the operating system to benefit from increased development. I simply don't understand why developers keep investing their time on platforms that are openly hostile to them.

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!

Don’t forget f.lux, now Night Shift.

> you might find another OS starts to benefit

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...)

> 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.

It doesn't matter when some developers condone the forces that take advantage of them because of incentives(stockholders) or general apathy.

> 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.

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.

Was Spaces an app before it was a feature? Currently I'm using third party software to pretend I have Spaces instead of the awful thing that replaced it.

Apple bought Cover Flow. And then retired the concept for the most part since it really wasn't that good of an idea.

How do you send a notification now without Growl? Each time I try to google for a tutorial, they all say “just use growl.” Ultimately I gave up and installed growl, and it works quite nicely.

I’d just like to pop up a notification programmatically via a bash script. :)

Similar things happened with most of the popular jailbreak utilities for iPhones. Custom backgrounds, app icons, ... really all of the successful modifications were eventually pulled into iOS.

There aren't really that many ways to do notifications.

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?

> 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.

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?

Who is shunning developers on the Mac? If anything I think most Mac users lament the dramatic shift toward cross platform/Electron apps.

And locking the OS behind a gilded cage and not letting developers tinker. I’m done with MacOS as of Big Sur. M1 is massively intriguing but I am done with macs for a while. Over half of my companies 2018 macs had battery bloat and broken keyboards. Bloat breaks the keyboard. Half! It’s a real shame. I can’t abide by it anymore, as a developer I feel shunned by the OS now.

The last few weeks have been non-stop rave reviews of the new Mac. I doubt they’re worried.

Is this actually true? Notifications were in iOS way before OSX, and it seems like that is the actual implementation that eventually made its way into Mountain Lion.

I mean, Toast notifications weren't even invented by Growl. It was nice software but this seems like hyperbole lol

I sorely miss Adium. I’ve learned to accept that I just have half a dozen mostly feature compatible chat apps open to communicate with the people who use them... but Adium was a real gem. I had it configured to minimal everything and never thought about what protocol I was using. Just a consolidated list of people and a tiny window with active chats in tabs. I’ve seen several attempts at unifying the current chat landscape and they all just look like gigantic webviews of the underlying frontend. What a step back!

This was a total blast from the past. I had forgotten about Adium. I used Growl for years but forgot about that too.

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.

Oh Haxies, I remember writing run-time patches (aka, cracks) to bypass licensing/registration for several pieces of software. There was a common framework, whose name no eludes me, that could be almost universally patched giving access to tens (100s?) of software.

I would still be using Adium today if they had made it a fully featured Matrix client. I moved to Element instead, which is nice, but I always liked Adium's UX better.

Anyone know why support for Matrix was never added to Adium? I never quite understood that given its robust support for XMPP.

Windows has had a minimal form of standard notifications since Windows XP, which appeared as speech bubbles coming from the bottom right corner.

Just linking to the original story of appget vs winget: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/

Can you tell some stories of that era? Would love to hear the ups and downs, good and bad.

Yeah, it was definitely in 2012. I was there that year (was not in 2014), and remember briefly speaking with at least one of the Growl developers (might have been OP) about it. As I recall, they were (publicly) optimistic about the future of Growl, but of course it seemed clear to me that its days were numbered.

> I'm still not sure if it works on unsigned apps

You don’t even need an app; you can show a dialog from AppleScript. Using a shell:

  /usr/bin/osascript -e 'display notification "whatever"'

You can add a title, subtitle, and sound[1]. Adding a custom icon is trickier and does require a built app.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...

I thought Growl had that built-in already.

Why would you do that? Just use the native notifications.

This is why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25235490

HN is marking the passing of Tony Hsieh.

If you have the context of being a geeky Mac user about 10 years ago you likely would. Growl was an open source notification system that many apps supported. Like it said in the article, in 2012 macOS started shipping their own. So the usefulness and popularity dropped.

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.

https://growl.github.io/growl/

> Are people, in general, supposed to know Growl is?

No, but if you don’t then the post is just not relevant to you.

Same on Windows. I find desktop notifications to be extremely annoying. On Windows applications can highlight themselves on the taskbar; that is more than enough to call my attention.

> 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”.

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!"'

Which is why we split visual displays and actions in Growl 2. You could entirely disable visual displays and set actions for specific notifications.

I loved Growl because it helped me manage my ADHD, I could monitor conversations without switching apps. For some of us communication is the main purpose of computing.

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.

This is actually the core failure of the Linux approach and why they year of the Linux desktop never occurred. Because there is no 1-true approach, developers must support too fragmented of an ecosystem, thus Linux becomes too big a lift to target for software titles.

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.

I've built several tools like this over time. One was rdocul.us. The point of these tools was not to make me money, it was so that I would work myself out of a job. I was at Rails Conf '08 and and some guys in the back room were walking by and saying "it'll be like rdocul.us but BETTER" and I was like cool I don't have to care about that site anymore. It was that or go way too deep into the documentation engine for ruby than I wanted to at the time, crap didn't even build. The other open versions were so tightly coupled to the html output I was going to have to write somthing else. Given I built the site after I 3rd degree separated my shoulder on day 3 of a 12 day ski trip and I was just in the bar self medicating out the rest of the trip till my S/O showed up for the last 2 days, I wasn't really interested in doing more work. So good for them. Didn't even want to say "yo I built that" as I wanted them to feel like they were the underdog. doc sites are so much better these days and I like to think I helped in just a little bit by showing what an online and searchable site would look like with essentially push hooks from github (it polled repos every hour as there were no webhooks then, and anyone could register any repo to be documented).

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.

Before OS X I used slackware. At the time it did most of what I needed. I found the community around it lacking.

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.

This seems to be more of an illustration of the “platform owner copied and obviated your idea, so what’s even left to do?” problem.