Growl is a notification system for OS X. Growl has been around since 2004, and was originally called Global Notifications Center. The name was changed to Growl (like the noise a dog makes) since we felt the name Notifications Center was too geeky. We were wrong about that haha.
Growl was meant as a proof of concept which became something more for a long period of time. Before Growl was made developers either had to pop up a very basic window or some other ugliness nobody liked. Working with developers on Adium and Colloquy who wanted to implement their own custom notifications into their applications is what birthed this project.
Growl is a retired project, we couldn't think of another thing to change which would be substantial enough to bring out a new updated release. Growl is stable and should work for as long as intel based programs work. Anyone who wants to run Growl is free to do so in an unsupported fashion.
Developers who integrated Growl with their application are advised to migrate to Apple's solution for their application's notification needs.
If you have Growl and you want to remove it from your system, there are two ways:
- Growl 2.x
- Find Growl, it's an app probably in your Applications folder.
- Double click on Growl.
- Stop Growl and the menu item if it's running.
- Quit Growl.
- Delete the Growl app.
- Growl 1.2
- If you are running Growl 1.2.x, Growl is in your System Preferences application.
- You can open System Preferences.
- Then click on Growl.
- Stop Growl and make sure the menu item isn't running either.
- Then go back to the main menu of System Preferences
- Control+click on Growl and Remove Growl.