Growl notification support
 

Hi All,

I had one little suggestion for future versions of OmniWeb: Growl notification support...
I love [URL="http://growl.info/"]Growl[/URL]. OW could use it to display new posts on RSS feeds and to notify of successful downloads. To make it less obstructive, it could be used only when OW is on the background. In any case, I'd love to get Growl support in OW...

One thing I requested for Omniweb [i]ages[/i] ago was to display in the dock an animated icon showing when downloads were in progress; I don't download things too frequently, so when I have a long download I could just monitor the dock rather than having to switch windows all the time.

Anyway, if growl notification were added, a "downloads complete" notification would be awesome!

I like the idea of a download progress bar. Something like photoshop's progress bar on the dock icon.

<mini rant>On a side note, I'm curious what others think about Growl. A while back someone had me try it out and said it was really cool and useful. I tried it and found it absolutely horrible. I was just reading through their site and some of the claims they make seem like bigger exaggerations than any politician has ever made. I've seen viruses on Windows that I would rather have.</mini rant>

[QUOTE=Forrest]I like the idea of a download progress bar. Something like photoshop's progress bar on the dock icon.[/QUOTE]

That'd be neat, although it might get complicated with with lots of downloads. That's why Growl seems like a good idea ...

[QUOTE]<mini rant>On a side note, I'm curious what others think about Growl. A while back someone had me try it out and said it was really cool and useful. I tried it and found it absolutely horrible. I was just reading through their site and some of the claims they make seem like bigger exaggerations than any politician has ever made. I've seen viruses on Windows that I would rather have.</mini rant>[/QUOTE]

I think I've had Growl installed for quite some time, and I don't remember it been quite that horrible, but, then again, I never used it for much until recently. It's clearly still in development but does work. One of the biggest problems is less than stellar implementation of Growl in particular apps. It's a neat idea, and I think it's the kind of thing that Apple should be working on instead of things like iPhoto (not to incite any flames here, just to say that I wish they were developing the OS more rather than adding apps; I've never used iPhoto, simply commenting on what sorts of software should be part of the OS; then again, there are apps like Keynote, which I've started to use, that are much more pleasant to use than the M$ alternative).

There are uses for it that don't seem like good ideas to me (like RSS notifications—I'd hate to see fifty or a hundred little Growl windows line up every hour when NNW updates). But for little things like finished downloads or errors in programs in the background it works well. Instead of an app hopping in the dock asking for attention for a notification window, Growl just shows it and removes it, a window that you don't need to touch for it to disappear. (Incidentally, I nostalgically remember that After Dark would run notifications along the menubar while screensavers were on.)

Growl's also scriptable. So I've used it for a couple of scripts with LaunchBar and OnMyCommand for things like dictionary lookups or MD5 hashes.

[QUOTE=Forrest]On a side note, I'm curious what others think about Growl.[/QUOTE]

I find it useful myself, though I can definitely see how it could be annoying. I do like the fact that you can turn off/customize notifications on an application basis. Growl reminds me of Zephyr (part of the Athena projects from MIT). We used to use Zephyr at work to send notices such as when printouts were ready for pickup etc.

One of the things I used it for was an IM app I was trying out. I just wanted the dock icon to highlight when I had a message. This app couldn't do that, but the dev said to install growl and that would do it.

Well, maybe it was the IM app's implementation, but getting a notification about something about ever 10 seconds is completely absurd. Although Growl makes the completely far from reality claim that it offers "complete control over which notifications are shown and how they are displayed" I found its control [i]extremely[/i] limited and made the IM app completely useless.

Ack, I'm getting started again...

I'm guessing you were not using Adium, which is what I use for IM, since it does change the dock icon for new messages and is a rather good app all around. It also though has an overkill Growl implementation, but at least it gives you the choice. I don't know think it has the option, but Colloquy (an IRC client based on the excellent irssi) has options to display Growl windows only if it's not in front, which alleviates the matter.

In short, Growl itself doesn't really [i]do[/i] much; it's up to the app to make good or bad use of it.

Aye, the biggest downside with growl is it's customization depends a lot on the design of the applications using it. It has no true filtering of it's own from what I've seen, it depends on the applications breaking down messages into their own categories and their decisions on what to send messages for.

From one end: An IM client that sends a growl notifications all in the same category and sent one everytime someone typed a key at the far end would be scary in growl. On the other end an IM client that let you set settings for notifications for each member of your friends list, or even only set one message for the first message received while it was in the background would be much more livable.

Actually it was Adium. I don't remember exactly why I didn't like the display and tried growl, but I think it may have been because the dock icon kept bouncing when there was a new message, or maybe it was that the number of new messages wasn't display.

I now use Proteus.

Some developers try to stay away from 3rd party frameworks closed or open source.

For example I suggested Growl support to iGetter guys, they said they don't want to depend on a 3rd party tool whether it is open or closed source.

It could be case with Omni group too.

I mean, if nobody from Omni replies, it must be the case :)

It can't be GPL reason (which stops closed source/commercial apps) as its covered by BSD license.