cocoaforge

I've read the posts here including the dev notes. For me, the fade out issue is the single annoying feature of growl. I'm not saying the single most annoying feature, I'm saying that IMO it's all that's wrong with Growl.

I don't think the Devs are truly listening. People are asking you to have a facility to disable it, and all the replies are either in the category of 'it's too hard' or 'you're preferences are wrong'. There are moments where an application will send a growl notification which isn't of the greatest importance, however it doesn't necessarily mean the whole application is at fault or spammy. It might just be that the application happened to send one notification that isn't really important, however the application can and usually sends important information which requires notification.

Now, if this notification were to arrive while you were in the middle of something, such as playing WoW where it had a performance impact on your game, or was just an unwanted distraction, there should be a method to dismiss it. And there is, it's a close box. The problem is that unlike every other close box on a computer, this doesn't do an immediate close, which is quite counter intuitive.

Now again, I love growl - don't get me wrong. But this is one issue that needs addressed - as some have stated, it's enough to have people uninstall the application, which I've considered too.

Google sent me here, too.

Tick, I think I understand what you're saying, and I completely agree. The problem isn't just the fade time; it's that fading, clicking, timers, and whatnot are essentially hacks. In a dream world, we want Growl to read our mind, notify us of only the things we care about, for only as long as we care about them, without distracting us from whatever we're doing, and to clear those notifications as soon as we stop caring. Clicking and fading and such are all poor proxies for the DWIM "tacit acknowledgement" feature.

I'm wrestling with a similar problem I found in Thunderbird, which lets you decide that "I've had this message open for 2 seconds" is a proxy for "I'm done with it; mark it read". Sounds great, but no matter how it's implemented, it's going to annoy you one way or the other. (See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436769 if you're curious.)

I posted a while back on the idea of gaze tracking; it's not soup yet, but I think in a few years, it could be an interesting way for Growl to let you tacitly acknowledge alerts.

One other problem with fading: It makes your computer feel slow. It's silly, it's psychological, but dammit, it's real. I was using some app - I can't remember which one at the moment - and it had a slider to control the speed of its animations, which involved cube-flips, or something like that. (Parallels, maybe?) I couldn't believe how much snappier the whole machine felt. This is on an 8-core 3.2GHz Mac Pro with 16GB RAM; it's fast no matter what you do. But animations take time, and it *feels* like you're waiting for the computer to finish.

(A few years ago, I read about the opposite problem; with computers getting so fast, some app or OS had to intentionally insert a delay in its UI, because when users would select a menu item, it would take effect so quickly that it felt like a no-op.)

Meanwhile... you implied above that we could write our own display style if we don't like the fading. I've never done a Growl display, and I'd like to avoid reading the entire dev manual. Could you give a 30-second rundown of what someone would need to look at to modify, say, Smoke to change the fade duration?

The_Tick wrote:How exactly is a 1 second fade distracting though?

Tick, if you need another scenario where 'fading' is distracting, here's one:: when you're remoting into a machine from a slow[er] connection like lo band DSL or slower.

Where you have to switch from color to black and white/greyscale in Timbuktu / ARD via a SSH pipe.

Having to render 30-60 frames for a Growl fade of 'Smoke' [non WebKit view, right?] basically seizes control of a remote machine for up to 5-10 seconds for me when I have to go into a server where I forgot to turn off Growl. This is not growling over the network, this is *viewing* the remote machine in Timbuktu, ARD or VNC.

What *I* would like to see is a 'view' like Smoke with no GL fade in/out effects that 'Pops' like the iphone in 2-5 frames. Or maybe even just *1* frame. I don't mind Growl sticky spam, especially if I'm asking for it [say, msgs from secure.log].

If it's possible to author a view like that they I don't see the point of changing Growl's API.

My workaround is to just turn Growl off when I do something framebuffer intensive [like viewing my remote machine in the above programs].

The_Tick wrote:How exactly is a 1 second fade distracting though?

Two words: Ed Norton.

Or, if you prefer: The guy in high school that thought it was clever to start to shake your hand, then pull it away, THEN shake your hand.

Jay Levitt wrote:

The_Tick wrote:How exactly is a 1 second fade distracting though?

Two words: Ed Norton.

Or, if you prefer: The guy in high school that thought it was clever to start to shake your hand, then pull it away, THEN shake your hand.

Neither of these seem to be relevant to this conversation.

The_Tick wrote:

Jay Levitt wrote:

The_Tick wrote:How exactly is a 1 second fade distracting though?

Two words: Ed Norton.

Neither of these seem to be relevant to this conversation.

Ah, but they are.

Ed Norton was annoying because you'd ask him to do something, and before he did it, he'd spend a minute rolling up his sleeves, straightening his hat, and in general, making a big production out of whatever he was about to do (say, handing you a pen). Ditto the guy in high school.

And ditto the Growl fades. "Look! A notification! We're fading in, and.. wait for it... wait for it.. wait for it... a contact has become idle!" Yes, thank you for telling me. "You bet! Glad to be of service! I'll be going now. in a second. Wait for it... wait for it..."

Obviously, I exaggerate. But that's the general gist of what I feel like while waiting the eternal 1000 milliseconds as it fades in and out: "Why, I oughta..." I'm Ralph Kramden.

So... Tick... Have we convinced you at all, yet?

I ended up removing Growl from two dozen Macs at a client's site last week because of complaints about the work flow interruption. Here at home - growling is now either disabled or uninstalled on all our Macs except my Smurf. I've disabled its growling, except from Adium for the purpose of beta testing.

Please...

- Dan.

I found this thread here because I came from the aMSN Forum, but this Growl „issue" really annoys me too. I thought exactly the same like the other users here in this thread.

Those fading animations are a little bit too slow. Do you know the zoom in and out in the Finder if you open or close a window? Would you still want to have it, if it would take up to 1 sec to to do the animation? I wouldn't. It would annoy me. And that's the thing with Growl. It annoys me to wait for the bubbles to disappear. It's really annoying if you want to click on a window a button, then a Growl message appears and you have to wait that you can click the button you just wanted to click.

Couldn't you just make a hidden preference editable by changing a key in a plist?

The other things the dev mentioned here, like spam protection, are really cool too, but this fading thing annoys me more.

I would love to see that feature (the feature to disable the feature, lol). Anyways, growl is great, keep up the good work

The thing is, there *is* a display called 'Music Video' that behaves like a visor / console on the bottom of the screen. It doesn't fade, it slides. Try it out.

I'd be most grateful if the devs would have more views than the 90% of what's in the list that faaaaaaaaaadddddeeeeee. Things like *slide* [like Music Video] or *pop* [like an error etc dlog on the iPhone] .. or even just *sheet.in.the.corner* in milliseconds. If you're using WebKit this should be possible, right?

Here's a suggestion for a QUICK offswitch. I'd like the Growl Menu.next to have *more* functionality. How about this for a mini spec::

1/ The Growl menu is primarily an on/off switch for Growl. Click once, it's BLACK, Growl-on. Click again, it's GREY, Growl-off. This would be *very nice* for those of us ARD'ing / VNC'ing / TB2'ing into a remote machine on a slooooow connection. Push(on). Push(off). As opposed to push-mouse.move.then.push.again-ohthemouseclickdropped.doh!

2/ Cmd- or Cntrl- click / right.mouseclick on the menu and it 'reveals' to what we have now, disclosing the drop.menu items of Restart, Sticky, etc..

3/ I'd also like ONE ADDITIONAL subitem, 'Registered Applications'... that is a list of the Apps currently reg'd. *Maybe* keystrokes that do things to these apps, like hold Option+choose app.item to re-register, Shift+app.item to *de*register, etc.

BTW, the functionality/workflow/elegance of Items 1 + 2 can be seen in the excellent menuitem 'Caffeine' located here:

http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

Okay, that's my 2 yen. Thoughts?

So I came back to my Mac, to find this:



I hit one of the growl's close x with an option-click. And my Mac sat there... and sat there... and sat there... for almost 30 seconds before all the growls faded/vanished.

- Dan.

darmok wrote:So I came back to my Mac, to find this:



I hit one of the growl's close x with an option-click. And my Mac sat there... and sat there... and sat there... for almost 30 seconds before all the growls faded/vanished.

In this case, the best thing to do is go to the menu and 'Stop Growl' or 'Restart Growl'.. and that's why they need a better off switch.

ShowgetteR wrote:Couldn't you just make a hidden preference editable by changing a key in a plist?

That could be a good compromise, seeing that you guys don't want to load with options the preferences pane (which seems perfectly good to me!).

leoofborg wrote:

darmok wrote:So I came back to my Mac, to find this:



I hit one of the growl's close x with an option-click. And my Mac sat there... and sat there... and sat there... for almost 30 seconds before all the growls faded/vanished.

In this case, the best thing to do is go to the menu and 'Stop Growl' or 'Restart Growl'.. and that's why they need a better off switch.

What exactly do you suggest, because to me this statement is kind of silly.

darmok wrote:So I came back to my Mac, to find this:



I hit one of the growl's close x with an option-click. And my Mac sat there... and sat there... and sat there... for almost 30 seconds before all the growls faded/vanished.

- Dan.

You did notice all of the overlapping notifications under the non-overlapping ones right?

Also, this boils down to what I was asking previously in this thread. Is there any reason whatsoever that you actually use these unable to retrieve bl messages?

This is also a good argument for a better filter/spam filter system for Growl, long term.

leoofborg wrote:

1/ The Growl menu is primarily an on/off switch for Growl. Click once, it's BLACK, Growl-on. Click again, it's GREY, Growl-off. This would be *very nice* for those of us ARD'ing / VNC'ing / TB2'ing into a remote machine on a slooooow connection. Push(on). Push(off). As opposed to push-mouse.move.then.push.again-ohthemouseclickdropped.doh!

2/ Cmd- or Cntrl- click / right.mouseclick on the menu and it 'reveals' to what we have now, disclosing the drop.menu items of Restart, Sticky, etc..

This isn't absolutely mac like, it sounds like something I've seen on windows though.

However, maybe if we reversed that and made option+click work in the method that you want, that might be useful.

However, this is not appropriate for this thread.

leoofborg wrote: 3/ I'd also like ONE ADDITIONAL subitem, 'Registered Applications'... that is a list of the Apps currently reg'd. *Maybe* keystrokes that do things to these apps, like hold Option+choose app.item to re-register, Shift+app.item to *de*register, etc.

We can't do this. It invalidates the current unspoken contract which is that Growl doesn't interact with applications, they just register and send. The auto-registration process was created in order to resolve this, so that apps don't have to register if they have some optional items in their .app bundle, but that's still not forcing an application to do something that they don't explicitly specify to do. If all app devs switch to the new registration method, it will probably resolve this. Either way, stop and start the service and they should reregister on the new registration method (if I remember that right). Either way, we're not doing what you are wanting here exactly, but long term it should help.

The_Tick wrote:You did notice all of the overlapping notifications under the non-overlapping ones right?

Yes.

The_Tick wrote:Also, this boils down to what I was asking previously in this thread. Is there any reason whatsoever that you actually use these unable to retrieve bl messages?

No way of knowing what the buried ones said or what app they were from, so... who knows what use they might have been.

Note please that any "growl management" functions would be unusable in this situation. Assuming you could re-stack 'em and filter out the dups quickly, the long w a i t for each to fade as you dismissed them would make the whole process untenable.

- Dan.

I don't think you're getting my point darmok. You have a bajillion useless notifications on that screenshot. When you have a single notification, is the fade still that annoying that we need to spend man hours modifying it rather than working on other things? That screenshot, to me, says that you need to rethink your notifications and perhaps disable some notifications from the culprit application, Adium in this case.

The_Tick wrote:I don't think you're getting my point darmok. You have a bajillion useless notifications on that screenshot. When you have a single notification, is the fade still that annoying that we need to spend man hours modifying it rather than working on other things? That screenshot, to me, says that you need to rethink your notifications and perhaps disable some notifications from the culprit application, Adium in this case.

Yes, when there is a single notification the fade is still and forever so annoying that it is THE feature that makes me curse at Growl. At this point, I keep Growl on the two Macs I use most, simply for testing. I have removed it from all the other Macs, including all those of my client. The ONE reason: the fade interrupts the work flow. So yes, to me, it is worth the time of eliminating it. I don't even care to have a preference for it. Please - I just want it GONE. I want NO excessive eye-candy interruptions to my workflow. Growl is a GREAT idea for so many things. It just needs to be reigned in a bit. Please.

WRT that screenshot... I posted it as an example of the worst case mega-fade. Yes, Adium overgrowled. Yes, it would be helpful to have some sort of filter for that, to reduce the dups - in order to find that one in a bajillion that might have been important. But the point is -- even when I held down the option key and hit one of the growl's close boxes ... that eye-candy fade stalled my system for OVER THIRTY SECONDS. It provided NO functionality. It just totally prevented me from using my Mac for that time. Ok. That was on my slow Smurf. Today, I had pretty much the same scenario on my 1.5 GHz PB G4. And it still took over 15 seconds for the screen to clear and become responsive...

HTH,
- Dan.

I thought of a more computer-centric analogy:

Growl fade-in is like flash intros. Without a "skip intro" button.

Growl fade-out is like mousetrapped sites.

Tick, any chance of a sentence or two on how I might modify my copy of, say, Smoke to remove the fade-out? If it's that brain-dead-simple to change, I'm happy to do it that way.

You'd have to comment out the code that performs the fading.

I don't get how the fade can be that annoying, I'll have to play with it more.