Replies inline. On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 8:56 AM, ejtttje <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think you guys have made some wrong turns in terms of user > experience lately. > > I disagree. A lot of the changes were due to the overwhelming amount of user feedback we were getting. Changing to the app store was in part due to end users disliking our updating method. The support@ address being added was due to end users not wanting to join this group just to post a single question. There's lots of other things, but I want to answer your specific items. > For one, I was surprised I was still getting notifications that Mail > 5.1 wasn't loading GrowlMail, yet Growl still reported it was up to > date. GrowlMail hasn't been a part of Growl for over a year now, so I'm not sure why you are surprised. > It was only when I manually went to check the website that I > discovered it now lives in the App store. So you probably lost a > chunk of your old userbase there, but hey maybe the new blood makes up > for it. > > We haven't turned on the update checker, and will not until 1.3.1 is out. Effectively though, this change helps to separate the two products further, making it explicitly clear that GrowlMail is not Growl, and vice versa. > Then I read GrowlMail (and GrowlSafari) is no longer supported, WTF > that's the my main reason for using Growl. This is the main reason for *you*. GrowlSafari will no longer work once Apple enforces Sandboxing with Safari, so it was either dedicate resources to it now, or cut it now. We opted to cut it now. > Reading on, oh GrowlMail > is just being forked as an external project. OK fine, that could be > promoted a little better instead of the doom-and-gloom complaining > about how hard it has been to maintain. The GrowlMail site is almost done, when it is done we'll retype that page out a bit so that it's clearer. However, the reasons there are valid, real, and people were continually asking so we wanted to be transparent. > Although, really? I've been > an early adopter of many of the past OS updates, in my experience it > has been a simple matter of a few seconds to update the version > compatibility string. If you look at the version history there was a lot more done than just a uuid change. > If that's really too hard to support what seems > to be your most popular plugin, I'd say your dev priorities are a > little out of whack. I realize you want to focus on the core > notification library, but it's important to dog-food and provide a few > of your own plugins: provides internal testing, demo code for devs, > clear out-of-box functionality for users, and perhaps most importantly > a "killer app" to attract users in the first place. > GrowlMail has always been a separate product, it was just shipped in a confusing manner before, just like GrowlTunes, GrowlSafari, and others. > > Well whatever, so I have to hunt down a bunch of external plugins to > get any functionality. Oh but now I read 1.3 drops support for > various API protocols, so a bunch of 1.2-based apps are going to be > broken until they are updated too. > > A bunch of apps that implemented Growl support in a way which we didn't recommend. Or they just didn't keep up with what we were doing. Both of these issues will have a user driven workaround before we turn the update checker on. > And now you want me to pay $2 for this? That's cheap, and I'd love to > support developers, but your timing is terrible. I've had to manually > track down this update, lost my favorite plugins so now I have to > figure that out too, and who knows if they'll even be supported > anymore. Sounds like I'm paying to take several steps backwards, I'm > not really enthusiastic about rewarding this new direction. :( > > I think the problem you misunderstand is that, without this change in direction, we were going to just kill the project. Before changing towards this, we only had a handful of developers. As soon as we announced the change, we gained a lot of developers. What we're looking at is the fact that, for the moment there are problems. But over the long term this is the better path to take for the project ultimately. If we hadn't taken this path, it's likely that after November 1 applications would stop functioning as they implemented sandboxing, and with no clear path for addressing this in applications then Growl would have just stopped existing. Chris > Thanks, > -Ethan > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Growl Discuss" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Growl Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss?hl=en.
