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Not only that, but Apple already had a similar feature in MacOS 8 and 9 that Growl was reproducing in OS X. It seems like Apple just hadn't gotten around to putting it in OS X yet because other things were more important. Then eventually they had time and added it.

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I never used macOS until OS X and most definitely did not copy it. Nothing about Growl was a copy of that.

Growl was inspired from being project manager on Adium and worked with the people making colloquy. The devs on colloquy were working on notifications and so we’re we and I thought it was smarter to make it a separate tool.

Hey Chris, for what it's worth, your software was quite a lifesaver for me in my earlier OS X days back in college. Your software had great impact on my workflow and I'll never forget it. :)

Happy to hear it. We’re totally didn’t know what we were doing really, just making something we wanted.

It just illustrates how natural the concept is. I don’t mean that in a bad way; it’s such an elegant solution and I would not be surprised to see other implementations before MacOS 9.

Anyway, Growl did much more than that, and I don’t think there is any doubt Apple’s current implementation owes a lot to your design.

Yea I just wanted to clear up the inspiration bit. I’m sure if we hadn’t done it someone else would have.

Fair enough. Thanks for the clarification.

Not very similar. If you wanted a message, the OS put up a modal dialogue blocking everything else. The whole point of Growl was that it didn't interrupt you, and you could have its messages go away on their own.

There were these yellow messages that popped up in the upper right-hand corner in MacOS 9. Those were just non-blocking notifications.

Exactly. They look a lot like Growl and the macOS X notifications and were not modal.

Wait wat? I’m not disputing this but I came up on MacOS (it wasn’t even named that at the time, I believe I got started on System 6) and I never saw notifications like that.

Around Mac OS 9, they changed some types of errors from modal dialogs to floating palettes in the corner of the screen.

I’ve never seen these before. Sounds interesting but not the inspiration for Growl by any means. :)

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