Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Hardware Growler Fork Notification Software 2020

Hardware Growler Fork Notification Software 2020




Introduction


Growl is a notification software for macOS (Mac OS X), it looks nice and configurable eg. display location, duration stay on the screen. Growl is available on Windows systems as well. With Growl, you can have a universal notification system for application.

Growl started when there was no good notification system on Mac OS systems. Notification Center was included in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in 2012. Growl can send notifications to macOS Notification Center.

Early days of Growl. A few Mac OS software bundle Growl with their software, eg. Adium, Dropbox, Adobe CS5 etc. Some users are angry because these software just install Growl on their system without them knowing it. Later Adobe made an announcement about it, here, https://blogs.adobe.com/deployment/2010/05/growl_installation_with_adobe.html.

Hardware Growler



Hardware Growler is a software that sends notifications (to Growler) when users plug in or unplug a device in the system.

Growl 2.0


Growl started as a free, open source notification software, but it started to charge USD3.99 on macOS App Store with version 2.0. Growl is licensed under BSD, so it can be used for commercial and close source.

Growl and Hardware Growler fork


Since Growl (and Hardware Growler) is open source, someone has mirror and fok the software. Now it can be found here:

https://github.com/pranav-prakash/HardwareGrowler-NC

I am not sure how to compile the above software. When I load it with Xcode (10.13.1), it warn me about 32 bit, so it may not works with macOS 10.5 Catalina.

This following Hardware Growler has been modified to send notification direct to macOS Notification Center. This software is small and easy to compile. https://github.com/cirrusj/HardwareGrowler. I have tried it on Mojave + Xcode 10.13.1.


$ git clone https://github.com/cirrusj/HardwareGrowler
$ cd HardwareGrowler
$ make
⇒ build/Debug/HardwareGrowler.app


Then run the HardwareGrowler.app, you can move/copy to /Application[/Utilities] folder.
I tried this on macOS 10.14 Mojave, it works.

If you just want the binary for Growl 2.0, you can check the blog here http://blogs.umb.edu/michaelbazzinott001/2014/09/21/growl/

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