Growl 1.3.1 is out, no longer free

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/growl/id467939042

by avirambm • 15 years ago

91 99 15 years ago

itunes.apple.com

lautis• 15 years ago

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.

nspragmatic• 15 years ago

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

chow• 15 years ago

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.

vertr2• 15 years ago

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.

Zev3• 15 years ago

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.

tom9729• 15 years ago

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

zacwest3• 15 years ago

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.

sjs• 15 years ago

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.

bauchidgw• 15 years ago

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

yoklov• 15 years ago

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!)

albertzeyer3• 15 years ago

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

rgovostes3• 15 years ago

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.

ceejayoz2• 15 years ago

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.

albertzeyer3• 15 years ago

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.

potatolicious• 15 years ago

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.

xal• 15 years ago

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.

sausagefeet• 15 years ago

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

MrEnigma2• 15 years ago

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.

gojomo3• 15 years ago

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.)

jeromeflipo• 15 years ago

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).

priteau• 15 years ago

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.

masklinn3• 15 years ago

> 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.

chc2• 15 years ago

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.

Greenisus• 15 years ago

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

pnathan• 15 years ago

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.

Sidnicious3• 15 years ago

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.

MrEnigma2• 15 years ago

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.

thibaut_barrere• 15 years ago

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.

andrewljohnson• 15 years ago

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.

watmough• 15 years ago

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.

egypturnash• 15 years ago

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.

MrFoof• 15 years ago

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.

jacobolus• 15 years ago

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.

masklinn3• 15 years ago

> 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.

llambda• 15 years ago

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.

omfg• 15 years ago

There's a checkbox to enable / disable it.

maximusprime3• 15 years ago

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

nailer• 15 years ago

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

kalleboo• 15 years ago

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

jabkobob3• 15 years ago

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.

cbs2• 15 years ago

>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".

Sidnicious3• 15 years ago

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.

ugh• 15 years ago

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.

icebraining6• 15 years ago

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.

kellishaver• 15 years ago

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.

haakon• 15 years ago

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-...

wavephorm4• 15 years ago

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.

jabkobob3• 15 years ago

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"...

wavephorm4• 15 years ago

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.

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

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.

wavephorm4• 15 years ago

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

icebraining6• 15 years ago

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

EDIT: is -> is (often)

GameGamer43• 15 years ago

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.

tezmc• 15 years ago

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.

sdfjkl2• 15 years ago

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.

sdfjkl2• 15 years ago

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.

xbryanx• 15 years ago

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."

buff-a• 15 years ago

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

blhack• 15 years ago

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

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

protomyth• 15 years ago

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.

bane• 15 years ago

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.

bricestacey• 15 years ago

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.

liar666• 15 years ago

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!

Growl 1.3.1 is out, no longer free

Related Stories