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October 23, 2005
Future of Growl?
So with 10.5 I keep hearing rumors that Apple is going to do a Watson or a Konfabulator, and either snatch up Growl or reimplement Growl. I figure I need to address these issues, and I should go ahead and do it now:
1) Growl is BSD licensed, meaning that Apple is very much allowed to snag all the Growl code and use it for their own. Even if they don't implement Growl, they could reuse stuff we've made and thus not have to recreate it.
2) With Watson, I believe the guy making Watson was offered a job at Apple to work on Sherlock, and he declined. He also sold it to Sun, probably for a sizeable amount.
Whereas with Konfab, Arlo made a huge hissy about it, in an very good attempt at gaining media recognition right before releasing a windows version. It worked well, and he sold to Yahoo.
3) All I ever wanted is for something like Growl to be in OS X/Windows/X Desktop systems for Linux and *BSD. I really just want to use it, I don't care who implements it.
So, with all that said. Should Apple take Growl or reimplement it, so long as they implement the features I need, I would be glad they did it. Growl would still be viable on 10.3/10.4. We could make the frameworks talk to the in system notification system on 10.5 as a convenience for applications, so they don't have to worry about it on 10.5 and it's already implemented in their app.
I'd prefer if they grabbed Growl entirely and just used it. We could use some Apple gui polish, and a full time dev on the project.
In either case, if Apple grabs it, I'd be pretty happy, and if they implement something similar, I'd be pretty happy.
So where does that leave the Growl Project? Why, at the Extras/Scripts of course. The Growl Extras have just added 2 third party applications, Rawr-Jour and Feed to the Growl Extras, and I might look for a few others down the road.
This means these applications get the benefits of the Growl development system, and the Growl Project gets some new Extras. It works out to be a decent deal all around.