Growl Coming to Mac App Store | News | Forum

The author of Growl has announced that they are going to distribute the next version of Growl (An amazing notification system for OS X) via the Apple Mac App Store.  Read the announcement after the jump.

Folks,

We're working towards Growl 1.3. 10.7 is going to change things for us, and
as such here are the changes coming down the pipe:

1) Growl is going to be put into the Mac App Store. There are multiple
reasons for this:
- This is the trend that we're seeing across the OS X community
- This will make distribution much easier for us. One of the biggest
complaints that I am seeing on Twitter is people complaining about updating.
*We do listen.*
- This allows us to get rid of the Disk Image entirely.
- We can get rid of the PKG installer.
- We no longer have to maintain Sparkle.
- For most folks this will make Growl much easier to install and keep
Growl up to date.
- This move also leads to making Growl a much easier application to find.
- There's more, but that's enough for this list.

2) Growl will become an application. This fits into the MAS rules more than
anything else we're doing.

3) Anything which does not go into the Mac App Store will be retired. We
already know that both GrowlMail and GrowlSafari no longer fit into this
category. I fully expect that GrowlTunes and HardwareGrowler will continue
in the Mac App Store. growlnotify should as well, but if it does not we'll
evaluate our options there.

*Do not expect any further releases of GrowlMail or GrowlSafari*. This is
only in bold so that it's easier to see. This should not be unexpected to
those who use GrowlMail already, since most of you know that it breaks with
every Apple Mail update. That is simply not something we wish to keep up
with. Going to the Mac App Store for distribution seals the fate of anything
considered more or less a "hack".

4) Growl itself will become 10.7+. 10.6 and below will not be supported in
1.3. 10.7 does not cost a lot of money and we feel that in the long run that
by supporting 10.6 and 10.7, it would be harder to push forward with Growl
development.

- *Note*: The framework will not be 10.7+, it will support previous
frameworks so that Developers only need to include one framework.

5) Growl-WithInstaller.framework is going away.

6) We're changing the communication path to GNTP from NSDNC and DO.
Applications which continue to use DO or NSDNC will get a line in the
Console asking users to contact them to update their Growl framework. Since
there is no other real way to communicate this change to Application
Developers, we feel that this is the best way to inform them. If someone has
a better idea here, please let us know.

All of these changes will take effect as soon as the mercurial repository is
put back up. We have a technical difficulty there, but it should be resolved
by Monday.

Also, keep in mind that we are looking for more Developers, and that these
are not all of the changes coming.

Feel free to reply here or to talk to us on irc on freenode at #growl.

Chris

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