Growl in Retirement

Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple’s notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we’re announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.

It’s been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career. However at WWDC in 2012 everyone on the team saw the writing on the wall. This was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Ironically Growl was called Global Notifications Center, before I renamed it to Growl because I thought the name was too geeky. There’s even a sourceforge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it.

We’ve had a lot of support over the years; from our hosting providers at Network Redux, CacheFly and others, to all of the apps using our framework, bindings, or any other integration. Special thanks go to Adium and Colloquy. Without these two projects having developers who wanted different types notifications, Growl wouldn’t have existed. Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X, iOS, Android or who knows what else.

Special thanks goes to Transifex who made localizing into 24 languages a lot easier than anything else we tried. It’s a fantastic product, if you make software please try it. Our localizers were fantastic people and should all be commended for their work.

For developers we recommend transitioning away from Growl at this point. The apps themselves are gone from the app store, however the code itself still lives. Everything from our rake build system to our code is available for use on our GitHub page