how to install growl if you have an old (non app store) growl
For starts, I have no connection to the growl project team, I am a user and am happy to do a small part to show my appreciation for the work that they have done to create this great application. My impressions of the app will be found below the install instructions.
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App store applications are not allowed to replace applications in your application folder or in other locations that they did not create. So, if you have growl 1.2, you cannot replace it with growl 2.0 without some preparation. I wrote up step by step instructions, but it would be better to go the growl website, click on downloads, and get the growl uninstaller application.
Now come to the app store and install growl. I just performed these series of steps on my dads computer and it worked. Years ago I had installed growl 1.2 on his computer.
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I have used the application for more than 4 years, and it continues to very useful to me every day. Most recently I have used it combination with audium, which is logged into my facebook chat. I suspected that 2 of my friends were the same person, and by looking at my logs, I was able to determine that 3 of my friends were the same person.
I do system administration, and often have my screen filled with terminal windows to different servers. Growl notifies me of incoming email messages from nagios as I bring computers online and offline, so if I am working on system A and make a minor change, then system B goes offline, I get notified immediately so I can fix it, hopefully before the customer notices that there was a problem.
Apple notifications can only be triggered by applications that come from the app store. Since growl comes from the app store, it can trigger apple notification center. Growl has many more applications available for it than the apple notification center, and can be used to bridge growl only applications with notification center.
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I do have two feature requests though.
One is to specify a growl log folder, and have the option to write a different log per application. I would then write a cron to purge old rss feeder logs, while keeping others.
The second is to roll the log files instead of truncating them once they reach a certain size, (can you use logrotate?) though the current solution is better than none. When I first encountered the problem of large growl logs, my computer was using 2/3 of it’s CPU doing spotlight updates on a heavily fragmented 1.5 gig growl log file that was being updated every 20 seconds (after which spotlight has to re-index the whole file) by my rss feeds all day long, but that was a long time ago. The problem described has been resolved in the current version of growl.
-Michael
mikegrok about Growl
