Growl's response to Notification Center: Welcome to the party, we were worried that we were being stood up
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was revealed yesterday. A few people have noticed a new feature that is somewhat similar to Growl. Apple calls it Notification Center. We would like to clear a few things up about how we view Growl going forward due to this announcement:
- Growl is not dead - Growl is alive and kicking - We are still actively working on shipping two future versions of Growl. Our understanding from press reports at this point is that Notification Center is only available to apps from the Mac App Store, which effectively locks out the entire class of applications that aren't or can't be in the store.
- We're investigating options for integrating Growl with Notification Center. It's pretty early on, but we expect to find some way to provide integration for both developers and users. We want the work that developers have to do to add notification support to their application running on 10.6-10.8 to be painless and seamless.
- Growl will work whether your application is from the app store or not - Growl will work for applications both in and outside of the app store. Any application that implements Growl support, gets Growl support.
- We're still on schedule to release Growl 1.4 and 2.0 - Growl 1.4 is already in beta testing, and includes a lot of great improvements that we think everyone who uses Growl will love. We'll post more on 1.4 next week. Work on Growl 2.0 has already begun, with the action plugins being split out and a new API in the works. We already see some of the benefits of this now with custom displays for Boxcar and Prowl, and want to expand in that direction.
- Growl is great for customizable notifications - Growl is still awesome for customizing your notifications. Making Capster display with the Nano display and GrowlTunes display with Music Video display is a great example of just one of the many ways that you can customize Growl notifications. It does not appear that Notification Center is intended to allow you to customize anything about how the information is presented to you.
- Development of our other applications will continue - We fully intend to continue development on HardwareGrowler, GrowlTunes, and Capster as Mac App Store apps. We also fully intend to continue development on growlnotify. The Mac App Store apps will gain Notification Center support either directly or through the Growl framework.
