Nobody learns if nothing is brok3n

August 15, 2008

Where Growl is headed and a call for developers

I haven't posted in a while, so I figured it would be a good time to give some updates. Growl 1.1.x development is winding down, and we're looking towards 1.2.

To start off, we have a new Lead Developer, Peter Hosey. Peter has been instrumental in the past in getting a lot of stuff done (along with other Developers), and just has a general understanding of the project, the codebase, and things involved with working on an open source project. He's an all around good guy and I'm glad he accepted the Lead Developer spot.

On to 1.2 stuff. We're basically going to be trying to take the stance of smaller feature sets make for faster releases. One thing we're probably going to have in 1.2 is GrowlTunesPlugin. This will replace GrowlTunes. Basically it's a plugin for iTunes, which does what GrowlTunes does now, and a few more fun things.

Another major thing we're looking forward to is the new TCP communications protocol. Basically we're going to be deprecating the old protocol at some point, and make this work. The end goal is to have a single protocol for cocoa, carbon, and networking. The spec is being worked on now, and there is a discussion going on right now in order to hammer everything out so that it works all cross platformy as well. We're even working to make it so that Adobe AIR can work with it, which would be a Good Thing.

As to 2.0 and beyond, Austin Sarner made a nice set of mockups that I think solve a lot of problems. However, we need Developers to help with this. Here's what it looks like (click the images to see them bigger):