Opinion and commentary about Mac and iOS applications, publishing and content consumption behavior, web and cloud architectures
October 8, 2011

Growl 1.3 in MAS: Paying to Break Compatibility

Paying $1.99 for Growl 1.3 to break compatibility with quite a few programs.

Christopher Forsythe:

Trillian needs an update if it’s not working. Also make sure you have the Growl preferences enabled in their preferences.

Skype is going to need an update from Skype to make Growl notifications work again.

The list can go on for a while. And that’s not the only issue with this release.

I went back to 1.2.2.

Update: Just to clarify, I was not posting this because I payed $1.99 or because the new version is basically broken—both these issues would be solved by an upgrade. But the thing that put me off was reading that Growl’s devs consider normal to break the app protocol—Growl is useful only as long as other apps are using it— and release it in the wild without giving a chance to the app developers to upgrade— actually the new Growl SDK is not even released. And all these leaving aside the customers’ experience.