Filed under: Software, Cool tools
GrowliChat
Speaking of Growl, make sure you check out growliChat, a little app that manages to display an alert when your buddy's status changes to online, away or idle, including the picture and username for AIM accounts in the alert. The program is windowless and dockless and best of all, it's free. The growliChat page also links to a discussion of how to use MSN in Tiger iChat. If using MSN, growliChat displays the username for MSN Jabber transport in the alert. Pretty cool little hack.
Judith would probably want me to mention that the new version of her favorite chat program, Adium X version 0.80, now natively supports Growl notification.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Michael Katz said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
.8 now nativly supports it? i can't get it to work for the life of me, with the newest version of growl
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janeiro said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
how brain dead am i??? i totally forgot about Jabber Transport Agents!! This means iChat can be used for just about every IM protocol. sweet!
does anyone know if your jabber account and aim account sit in the same iChat buddy list? what about running multiple aim accounts (i assume you could get around that with a jabber transport)?
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Magnus said 4:32PM on 8-21-2005
Michael Katz:
Under the "events" tab in the prefences you should be able to use growl, eather by using "Visual Notifications", or by creating a custom event preset.
At least that worked for me ;)
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Thomas Mango said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Michael: remove Adium and its folder in ~/Library/Application Support/ reinstall newest version of growl (www.growl.info) then install adium .8 from scratch. i heard that'll do the trick.
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Thomas Mango said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Adium is the greatest IM client that has ever walked the face of the earth*
*i realize Adium can't walk, but it is still amazing.
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creanium said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I'll second #5's praise for Adium.
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Keller said 12:20PM on 8-27-2005
I don't quite get the appeal of Growl. I mean, I like how each app has its own way of giving me notifications, so I can tell them all apart without having to read everything. For example, I can tell the difference between the Synergy notificaions and Adium ones, so it it doesn't have to say "now playing:" on all the Synergy notifications, I just know that. Going through the growl pref pane to set it up seems like an extra and unintuitive step.
I understand its to give devleopers an easy way to do notifications, but if they wanted to do that, why didn't they just make a library that could be dropped into any app.
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Brian said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Keller, that is the main problem I had with Growl. I played with iAlert and I like the setup much more.
http://angeman.perso.cegetel.net/iAlert/
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Chris said 10:55AM on 6-29-2005
It seemed like the best way to set it up at the time, but we'll be redesigning the applications tab shortly. What would you have us do differently? :)
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Brian said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Chris, I think that the growl has the right idea, I guess it was just hard to set up because the programs were added as they were opened. And I couldn't tell if the "extras" had to be put in different folders and bundles moved around. In iAlert, everything (safari, mail, ichat, etc) was there by default and you turned off what you didn't want on there.
(But like Keller said, I understand that the openness in Growl makes it possible for developers to really get in and set it up for their program.)
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Tee said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
version 0.52 is out bug fixed and respond time imporved download it at the same place
www.andrew.cmu.edu/~pongmong
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Keller said 12:20PM on 8-27-2005
Chris-
I didn't mean that anything in necessarily bad about the Growl interface. In fact, I hadn't played with it in a while, and was impressed by how far its come, and how nice it really is. However, my point is that the whole "idea" seems a bit unintuitive, and forces extra work on the end user.
First off, I do like the idea of making it easy for developers to add notifications to their app. It would allow more apps to have notifications, which is a benefit to the end user. However, it seems like making an extra step for the user to go through the Growl pref pane to set up the notifications.
I also don't really like the fact that all notifications look alike. I like being able to tell the notifications apart at a glance. I realize that you can do this by setting each app to a different "style" in the Growl pref pane, but again, its an extra step, and not an obvious one.
Related to this is the fact that each app has different needs of a notification system. Its nice for Synergy to show me a big picture of the album artwork, and a multi-lined display of title/artist/album/star rating/etc. Other apps might just need to show a single line of text. Its hard to shoehorn all these needs into 1 notification system.
One of my older gripes was having to go and install the Growl pref pane yourself, but now that they can be set up to do it for you (as Adium is now) thats not such an issue.
It seems like it might be better for the end user if Growl was more of a library or framework that the developer could put in their app. This way the developer could set up the notification style in a way that best suits the app's needs. This takes that burden off the user. It is less flexible, but its much easier. It would take away the ability for command line scripts to send notifications, but if the user was savvy enough to need this, then they could install the pref pane and manage it there. Otherwise, for the typical user, this isn't necessary.
Again, I want to say that I'm not trying to criticize Growl. Its very well-motivated and is an impressive piece of work. I'm just saying that when all is said and done, its a bit overwhelming for the end-user. We are at an age where computers are so powerful that just setting all the options can take way too much time. Its up to the developers to make some decisions and make things "Just Work". I think this is something Apple does very well. A power user might complain about lost functionality, but its a trade-off that I think is worth it a lot of the time. For every example of lost functionality these power users can come up with, there are probably 10 things that they themselves use that "Just Work" and work fine, and save them lots of time in the process, even if they may not realize it.
Whoa. Long comment, sorry about that, but I just wanted to explain myself.
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Chris said 10:55AM on 6-29-2005
Brian: Yes, I totally 100% agree that setting up the extras sucks. Bindings too. We're going to work on that in .8 or .9. We don't want to bundle them with Growl itself, but I think an external app could do the job nicely.
Keller: This is a problem with what we're trying to accomplish and what you think we're trying to accomplish. Basically the idea is to give the user control, not the developer, while still making it easy for the developer to add Growl to their application, and (hopefully) easy for the user to manage this whole thing.
I'd really like feedback as to why things are extra steps, etc.
Also, I don't feel it's an extra step to be able to to change the notification per application on fly in the Applications tab. This kinda makes sense, no? Can you think of anywhere else to put it?
We won't be doing your "make growl a framework devs can bundle and get rid of all preferences" idea. Sorry.
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