I have used Growl on my Mac for many years.
It is basically a notification app that kind of runs in the background. It works with a variety of other apps that support Growl notifications. When something happens in any of these apps, Growl will post that activity in a little pop up box in the corner of your screen – so you become aware of this activity even if you are not working in that app.
It is sort of like Notification Center in iOS 5.
Up until version 1.3, Growl was free and downloadable from their website.
But now it costs $1.99 and is available in the Mac App Store.
The thing is, they tell you about this with a pop up notification that annoyingly pops up again, and again, and again, and again.
It seems that you either need to upgrade or remove the thing altogether – just to get rid of the annoying pop up.
For $1.99, I thought that I would just upgrade and move on.
But in the Mac App Store, the reviews are pretty evenly split between good and bad. Some people had trouble getting it to work.
So that got me to thinking – did I rely on the functionality of Growl? Were those notifications useful to me?
Overall, my answer was no. It just did not have a big impact on my workflow.
So, even though I would have kept the old version (1.2.2 is the last free one), I decided to uninstall to make that upgrade reminder popup thing go away.
The uninstaller can be found here at the Growl website.
What have you done with Growl? Have you upgraded, uninstalled, or kept the status quo?
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How do I disable the update checker in 1.2.2 and below?
The update checker in Growl 1.2.2 and below will run automatically every 24 hours. The update checker in 1.2.2 admittedly is not great, and is one of the reasons that Growl is now in the App Store.
For those who wish to continue to run Growl 1.2.2, you can do so but will likely benefit from disabling the update checker.
To disable the update checker, follow these steps:
Open System Preferences
Click on Growl
Click on the About tab at the top
Please make sure that you are using 1.2.2. If you are not, please update to 1.2.2 available here
Uncheck “Check for updates automatically”
Close System Preferences, you are done