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Growl 2.0 and Mountain Lion Notification Center: working together

Growl

(US$1.99) is a favorite tool for many of the bloggers at TUAW. For those of you unfamiliar with Growl, it's currently the notification tool of choice for a lot of Mac users. When someone updates a shared Dropbox folder, for instance, or uses my name on the Colloquy IRC client, Growl lets me know by showing a floating window noting which app wants my attention and why. Sounds like Notification Center in Mountain Lion, doesn't it?

Well, the developers of Growl announced yesterday that they'll be coexisting with Mountain Lion's Notification Center rather than suffer the fate of being "Sherlocked" by Apple (a term meaning that Apple builds functionality into an OS release or app that usurps the need for a third-party app).

Growl's Chris Forsythe drew a roadmap for users and devs in a blog post yesterday, noting that "For Growl 2 we're simply going to add a Notification Center action display as well. This is going to make it easy for anyone who wants to see notifications in Growl, and also in Notification Center."

A new architecture will let Growl 2 handle visual notifications and actions separately. Forsythe says "You could have a Smoke display, and the Mail Me action fire from the same notification if you want."

Notification Center will only work with Mac App Store apps, while Growl 2 can allow apps that are sold externally and approved through Gatekeeper to enable desktop notification.

[via MacStories]