For many, many years, Mac users have been using Growl to receive notifications from their apps. For just as long, Mac users have been wondering how long until Apple rips off Growl and bakes it into their OS. Turns out, that time is now.
With yesterday’s surprise announcement of Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion came the unveiling of Notification Center for Mac. Not only do you get pop-up displays of notifications, but just like iOS, you can see a linen-lined list of all recent notifications at any time. This is a feature Growl was just able to implement a few months ago. Now, it is all for naught.
After looking at what Apple has shown to us so far, the implementation is very good. A quick click or swipe brings you to your list of notifications. Clicking on an individual notification brings you directly to the app that spawned it, and allows you to edit it.
From system preferences, you can manually alter the behavior of each application’s notifications. If you want them to be sticky notifications, make them alerts. If you just want them to pop up and then disappear, that’s for banners. Of course, you can completely disable them on an app-by-app basis. You’re in control, and that’s why we think Growl’s days are numbered. This does everything the majority of users want, and it is already installed for you without any hassle or cost.
