Mountain Lion Hasn't Mauled Us Insists Growl

Apple's Notification Center was one of our favorite elements in our OS X Mountain Lion preview, but third-party devs Growl claim not to be concerned that the big cat is moving on on their territory. In a blog post titled "Welcome to the party" the developers of the long-standing notifications tool for Macs deny that Growl is dead, and say that in fact they're looking into whether it can be integrated into Notification Center.

"It's pretty early on," the team claims, "but we expect to find some way to provide integration for both developers and users." Even without that integration, Growl still has some advantages; as other developers have noted, Mountain Lion's system only works with software released through the Mac App Store. If you download a third-party app through your browser, even if it's signed with Gatekeeper's Developer ID, it won't be able to fire off alerts through the official Notifications Center.

Meanwhile, there are also benefits in customization, with the Growl team pointing out that there's a lot more flexibility in appearance and UI to its alerts. Notification Center allows users to choose the order in which apps are grouped in the list – for instance chronologically, or with work apps pinned to the top – but seemingly little more than that.

Two new versions of Growl are in the pipeline, and the developers seem upbeat about the prospect of continuing to compete even when Apple has baked similar functionality into the core OS. More on Mountain Lion in our full preview.

[via ArsTechnica]