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Comment by xal | Hacker News Reader

That's good. One of the biggest productivity gains you can have as an OSX user is uninstalling Growl. Being interrupted constantly by stuff that doesn't matter ( Email arrived, iTunes changed song, Download done ) will reduce your ability to focus on the task at hand and all of those things can be processed later and don't need immediate attention.

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I have to agree.

Having been using Growl for years, I mechanically went to buy it on the Mac App Store when 1.3 was released. To make sure the upgrade was clean, I first uninstalled the 1.2.2 version I had on my system… only to realized I could not install the new version, since I am still running Snow Leopard.

I did not reinstall Growl, and I am very happy with my system as it is. I had already disabled some notifications before, such as Adium messages showing up on my screen, but I still had some, like the name of the new song playing. All this noise is now removed and it is great.

I can see how Growl can have its uses though. Sometimes, you need to wait for a long process to finish in order to perform the next action (e.g. wait for a long download, deployment, or software build). Or for alerts of a monitoring system, where you would really like to be interrupted. I may reinstall it when I have such use cases, but enabling only the minimum number of notifications.

I know people really enjoy not being notified. However for things like email for me, since I need to be reading and up to date on them for work, it's much easier to look to the upper right of your screen and see what it is instead of switching apps and checking to see it's just a 'normal' email you don't need to respond to.

People also enjoy slot machines and heroin.

(Update: FWIW, I believe the parent read "people enjoy being notified", with no 'not', when I wrote this. Not sure if I misread or it was modified.)

Yes, because not being notified is equivalent of gambling and heroin.

Actually, being notified at unpredictable intervals, as a bit of random-reward, has effects on the limbic system similar to gambling and drugs. Onscreen notifications let you binge on these little pleasures: enjoyable, yes, but rarely productive.

Your strawberries are ready to be harvested!

Also to keep in mind: if you downvote this, you are probably an addict in denial! Our 12-click program is arranging meetings now in major tech hubs, check meetup.com for all the details.

For email and events, I don't really need another piece of software. Chrome offers desktop notifications for webapps & extensions (e.g Gmail & Google Calendar).

For me, it's more distracting to see the new email count tick up and be left wondering whether I care about what I just received (until I bring up my mail to find out).

Notifications let me know what's going on right up front (and if I don't want to be distracted, I can always close my email completely).

I'm all for turning off “iTunes changed song”-type notifications.

I disabled nearly all the attention getters for apps I use and I haven't looked back.

Actually I use Growl (and libnotify on Linux) for a very specific set of notifications I want to be notified of. Everything else doesn't apply.

Totally agree. Another thing that has helped me a lot is turning off the unread email count badge in Mail.app.

> Email arrived, iTunes changed song, Download done

Most of these are not even enabled by default (Mail and iTunes are not growl-enabled so you need to enable a separate addon to handle them), and are trivial to disable (a checkbox in the Growl preference pane)

If that is your "biggest productivity gain" as an OSX user, I'm sorry to say you're just an idiot.

Although I agree that this does not seem like a big deal, your tone reads as very hostile. We should strive for a higher standard at HN.

> We should strive for a higher standard at HN.

You can't strive for a higher standard when there is no higher standard to strive for: sometimes, a person is being an idiot and refusing to use the right word is just misplaced political correctness.

Misplaced political correctness? No sir, it's politeness. It's treating other people decently. It's acting like a mature adult rather than an angry, uncultured teenager. Bluntness just for bluntness' sake is what's misplaced in polite conversation.

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