A Note to Developers

Growl 1.3 brings a lot of changes. One of those changes is that Growl itself is now a purchase. However, we have accounted for this in the new Growl 1.3 SDK and want to discuss the implications here with you.

First, note that we will not be removing/hiding the 1.2.2 and older downloads. They should be easy to find on our downloads page.

Also, Growl remains Open Source Software. This page explains how to build Growl from source.

Next, and more importantly, Growl itself is no longer required in order to display a notification. The 1.3 SDK allows for applications to generate Growl notifications without Growl installed. This is called "Mist" and is a new feature of the 1.3 SDK. Thus, Growl becomes the "pro" version of Growl when allowing you to customize the notifications, and the "free" version is the built-in notification.

Generating a notification for either Growl or Mist requires the same code. The following table demonstrates the difference between when Growl is running and when it is not running.

For more information about the changes in the 1.3 SDK, our documentation has a full list of changes.