Growl 1.3.1 is out, no longer free

The complaints about growl being an impossible distracting productivity suck are overblown, and completely miss the point of growl.<p>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 <i>turn it off</i>.<p>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.

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.

Even though Growl 1.3.0 was distributed via App Store with the same price tag, the source code was published at <a href="http://code.google.com/p/growl/source" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/growl/source</a>. Seems like that practice has stopped as well.

Never had an issue with growl "parasiting" my attention. I'm happy to use it for automated tests feedback.<p>I have no issue to pay a few bucks for that to help out on maintenance.

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."

The latest episode of The Basement Coders has interesting coverage of the Growl situation and they interview someone who decided to fork it: <a href="http://basementcoders.com/2011/10/episode-47-fork-you-growl-interview-with-perry-metzger/" rel="nofollow">http://basementcoders.com/2011/10/episode-47-fork-you-growl-...</a>

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).<p>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.<p>At this point I've disabled Growl to find out how much I really relied on it.

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

Really disliked Growl when I had it installed.<p>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?<p>It's bad enough that I keep my GMail open continuously... I've thought about shutting that down for most of the day too.

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 <i>should</i>.

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.<p>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.

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.<p>I already have enough distractions as it is.

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.<p>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.

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

I was wary of this change myself, but I was just prompted to upgrade Growl, which linked to <a href="http://growl.info/growlupdateavailable" rel="nofollow">http://growl.info/growlupdateavailable</a> and also included a link to source and how to build and install <a href="http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-install.php" rel="nofollow">http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-insta...</a><p>Major props to the Growl team for subsidizing their work while also keeping it free.

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.<p>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!

Still free for programmers: <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920faf093?pli=1" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...</a>

To all of the people in this thread complaining about growl:<p>You realize that you can configure what it alerts you about, yes?

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.

I've always had a love/hate relationship with growl. Sometimes it just seems a bit <i>excessive</i> 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.<p>It would have been a better solution if they released a free stripped down version, and a 'Pro' version with the new toys.