ChrisGrowl

Before OS X I used slackware. At the time it did most of what I needed. I found the community around it lacking.

When I found OS X open source folks they were beyond welcoming. This is one of the bigger reasons Growl was on os x and not Linux.

Which is why we split visual displays and actions in Growl 2. You could entirely disable visual displays and set actions for specific notifications.

I never used Mac OS until OS X because I wanted a terminal with Unix userland and also ms office. I don’t know what feature you’re talking about and it was not a consideration when coming up with Growl.

Nope, I came up with it and that didn’t happen.

I’ve never seen these before. Sounds interesting but not the inspiration for Growl by any means. :)

Acquisition by Apple would have been an option if they had contacted us.

That’s really the key to our success with it, but it’s more. When a user found out about Growl and liked it, then they would request one or two app devs to add it. Those app devs did, the. Their users got it. Rinse and repeat. So it’s both developers and users who made it possible.

Yea I just wanted to clear up the inspiration bit. I’m sure if we hadn’t done it someone else would have.

Happy to hear it. We’re totally didn’t know what we were doing really, just making something we wanted.

It was a lot of fun back then. There was the c4 stuff and drunkenbatman and then open source stuff. A lot of fun to be had. I don’t see it a lot anymore

Good lord I forgot about that interview. I was so young haha.

Growl started around 2003 really

I hate those apps really. I use them because I need to but they aren’t fun to use.

Growl did more than pop into a corner. :)

I’m the author of this blog post. Feel free to ask me anything.

I never used macOS until OS X and most definitely did not copy it. Nothing about Growl was a copy of that.

Growl was inspired from being project manager on Adium and worked with the people making colloquy. The devs on colloquy were working on notifications and so we’re we and I thought it was smarter to make it a separate tool.