Matt Zanchelli

February 24 2013

Growl and Mountain Lion's Notification Center

I worked on something called Roar last weekend. It was a small project I started from scratch to help deal with Growl and Notification Center notifications. It would let you easily add a matrix of radio buttons that would let you either choose to send notifications to Growl, Notification Center or neither. It would only display the Notification Center preference if on 10.8 or above. Then, in terms of code, you would send your notification to one place and in there it would decide where to send it to (Growl or NC). However, after all that work I realised that I should not have done this in the first place. Notification Center has some great preferences built in to show or hide notifications from apps. Why should there be *two* places to control notification behaviour? There shouldn't be. I ended up deciding to display the preference for Growl on Macs running 10.7 and below and show no notification preference at all for Macs 10.8 and above. The app will now automatically send notifications to Notification Center on Macs 10.8+. If the user wishes to disable this, they can disable it in Notification Center preferences. I'm sharing this because if you ever find yourself in this situation, I highly recommend removing the preference entirely and leaving Notification Center to handle it for you. That's one of the beautiful things about Notification Center. I am considering returning to Roar and making changes to reflect what I've learned.