Nobody learns if nothing is brok3n

« Turning a dmg into an iso | Main | Natuba »

September 09, 2007

Growl Global Positioning System

So with Growl 1.1 the single biggest feature took about 2 years to make. I made a point of making sure this was in the changelog, the knowledge that it took 2 years is something that should either make users proud that we worked on it for so long to perfect it, or scared that we did, or just go "wtf". This guy certainly did the wtf (on tuaw and on macupdate). Gruber also did a wtf at the name.

So I guess I should explain what it does. Actually, it's pretty geeky. In 0.7.6 we had Growl just firing notifications. However, you couldn't tell it where to put notifications (except for bezel). Plus, notifications from different styles would overlap each other, so say if you had Adium and Cyberduck notifying you with different styles at the same time, one would post on top of the other. From a usability perspective.. well, there was no usability.

The really neat bit is how we resolved that. Growl now not only knows where a notification is, but it also understands that there are sections of the screen. So each of the options to select to display to is a section Growl knows about. It knows how to reserve a section of the screen for usage by one notification, and if another notification of a different size needs to be displayed, it knows if it has room, reserves it based on some logic, and then displays it.

Plus! We made it so that if one row filled up, it would go over to the side and start a new row, rather than continuing down the row and into emptyness. This would be really bad if you got a lot of sticky notifications at once (notifications that stay on screen until clicked) that appeared down in the unseeable/unclickable area below the viewable area of the screen. People who setup GrowlMail or something else to watch their email, and then get 400 notifications, know what I'm talking about here. It's a real memory issue, usability issue, and damn well sucked.

Plus! This system also is how we were able to allow users to specify different sections of the window to show off different displays. So say if I wanted Adium in the bottom left, and Cyberduck in the top right, I can do that. Scale that out to 30 apps, and it works pretty well.

So ya, that's what this does. Neat huh? It took so long to make due to the fact that it was pretty complicated, and also due to the fact that everyone who works on Growl does so in their free time. It was however unacceptable to release any kind of a 1.x release without something like this in it.