Growl, once a staple of the Mac desktop experience, has been retired

Growl, once a key part of the Mac desktop experience, is retiring after 17 years. Christopher Forsythe, who served as the lead developer on the project for years, announced his retirement in a blog post on Friday.

Launched in 2004, Growl provided notifications for apps on the Mac (it was also offered for Windows) before Apple launched its own notification center. Notification Center was added to macOS (then called Mac OS X) in the Mountain Lion update in 2012, but it debuted on iOS a year earlier.

Here’s an excerpt from Forsythe’s announcement:

Growl is retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift from developers to Apple’s notification system, and an obvious lack of ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we are announcing the withdrawal 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. It was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Ironically, Growl was called Global Notifications Center, before renaming it Growl because I thought the name was too geeky. There’s even a sourceforge project for Global Notifications Center still there if you want to go find it.

He went on to recall that Growl was developed in part because the popular messaging app Adium and the Colloquy IRC client needed different types of notifications than those available at the time. Typically, developers designed and implemented their own proprietary solutions for notifications, which were not always ideal experiences for users.

Once installed, Growl appeared in the System Preferences pane of Mac OS X, acting as a notification service for the platform, that is, until the aforementioned action center did. his beginnings. As Forsythe noted above, the writing was on the wall as soon as Apple made the announcement.

It appears that Apple’s new architecture change and other factors have led to the official removal of Growl now, although Growl has only been supported at a basic level for some time.