Growl

» see growl.info as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Growl started in 2004 as infrastructure nobody had asked for and everybody needed. Mac OS X had no system-wide way for an application to say that something had finished, so every application invented its own, which meant a different dialog box or bouncing icon for every program on the machine. Growl was a background process with an API. An app handed it a message, and Growl decided how that message looked and where it went, according to preferences the user had set once.

The design decision that mattered was putting control on the receiving end. The application said what happened. The user said whether it showed up as a bubble that faded from the corner or as a sticky note waiting to be clicked, and whether it showed up at all. Bindings existed for Objective-C, Python, Ruby, Java and AppleScript, so a shell script could raise a notification as easily as a shipping application could.

Mac ownership in Turkey through the 2000s was rare enough that seeing one in an office was worth a comment, and a computer engineering education there ran on Windows and on Linux. Growl lived entirely on the other side of that line. I know it the way you know a well-made tool from a platform you never worked on, which is by reputation and by the number of people who still complain that nothing has properly replaced it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it spread ~

Growl won by being the path of least resistance for developers. Adding notifications meant a few lines against the Growl API instead of designing and maintaining your own presentation layer, and your users already had it installed. By the late 2000s the list of apps supporting it read like a list of every serious Mac application of the era, from torrent clients through to build systems.

It was free and open source for most of its life, installed by hand as a preference pane, which in 2007 was a completely normal thing to ask of a user. Later the project moved to the Mac App Store as a paid app. That funded the work and also made Growl one more thing standing between a developer's app and a working notification.

~ what killed it ~

Apple announced Notification Center at WWDC in June 2012 and shipped it in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion that July. Forsythe has said plainly that he knew during the keynote what it meant. The system was conceptually the same product and it was already on every machine, which is not a competition any third-party utility wins.

Growl's original working name was Global Notifications Center, close enough to what Apple called its version that it reads as a joke now. Apple did not take the name. It took the position, and the position was the only thing Growl really had.

~ what nobody replaced ~

Growl kept running for eight more years, mostly for users who wanted the things Notification Center would not do. Forsythe published the retirement notice at the end of November 2020, giving Apple's move to its own silicon and the general migration of developers onto Apple's notification system as the reasons, along with a plainer one: there was no obvious way left to make Growl better than it already was. He pulled it from the Mac App Store and left the code on GitHub.

The code is still there. What is not anywhere is the part users actually cared about, which is a notification layer answering to the person receiving the notifications rather than to the application sending them. Notification Center inherited the position without inheriting that. Seventeen years is a long run for a utility, and the thing it was quietly protecting did not outlive it.

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