Either way, we need more control over Growl to make it low-maintenance. It would have been better if you either could add the applications manually to the list or if it has some wizard that scans your drive for applications and add those to Growl. And last but not least: Growl adds applications automatically after you've started them, not everything at once. This would also take away the annoyance of Growl taking over your screen (something like a scrollable list would do perfect). Also, it lacks a centralised notifications centre. Double click the icon in the notification area of the system tray and tick the box labelled ‘Automatically start Growl at login’ so that it will start automatically with Windows. Launch the application and allow it through the Windows firewall. The opt-in system would have made it a low-maintenance application because you don't have to recheck Growl to see whether you need to disable anything so you won't be swarmed by notifications. Download a free copy of Growl for Windows, and install the program. It should have been an opt-in application: you have to enable everything you want to be notified about. Growl is an opt-out application: you have to disable everything you don't want. That's why I call Growl high-maintenance. After a couple of days he got annoyed by it and configured Growl to not display notifications for new IM messages. He used to grab some coffee to allow the notifications to die out. In his case the notifications filled his 23" ACD. Each morning we received quite some messages via XMPP. I kept on highlighting him which filled his screen with Growl notifications I also had a colleague who used Adium as his XMPP client and he too used it with Growl and left it on defaults. I actually annoyed the hell out of some guy who was using Colloquy with Growl with the default settings. Having all notifications is not always necessary or wanted. In some applications you can do this in their own settings but in most you'll have to do this in the Growl prefpane. When installing a new application with Growl support you need to do that again. That means the users has to configure those notifications for each individual application. It actually enables all of the possible notifications the application supports. It detects every application that has Growl support and enables it. Quite easy: you have to configure Growl whether you want to or not.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |