A few questions on growl.

[flexOnTheRocks]

Hello Brian,

So, we were able to show the growl notifications with our Adobe AIR client, and the project team welcomed the idea of proceeding with growl as the notification system for our application.

However, I needed to clarify a few questions that came up during our discussion. I tried searching through the discussion board, but wasn't able to find answers for the same.

1> For an end user who does not have growl pre installed, is there a way to hook it up with our AIR application install, so that they don't have to manually go to the growl website to download and install it?

2> Post install, any updates to the growl application will be taken care of by the growl application itself or would it have to be handled by the AIR application?

3> I noticed that we needed to set a password in the AIR connector call (growl.setPassword("abcd");), which should match with the password in the growl application for the application to register with growl.

     Does this mean that the end user would have to setup the same password on the growl application for the notifications to work?

     If yes, is there a way around it? Maybe not setting a password or leaving the password field as blank?

4> For forwarding notifications to email/ iphone , instead of having the end-user configure it using the growl application, is there a way to configure it from the AIR application itself ?

5> Lastly, considering we have end users who use OSX (Apple Macs), I assume growl for windows won't work for them?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Thanks & Regards,

AJ

[DitherSky]

It is possible that #3 is a bug, I also can't register application without setting a password even though password checking was disabled in options.

[Brian Dunnington]

Glad to hear your team is considering using Growl for Windows. Let me
try to answer your questions the best I can:

1. There is a little bit of documentation about including the GfW
installer here: http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/distribution.aspx

That said, due to some other recent discussions, I am considering
combining the GfW installer into a single .exe, so as long as your
installation routine would let you launch another .exe, then you
should be all set. There is also way to check the registry to see if
GfW is already installed - more info here:
http://groups.google.com/group/growl-for-windows/browse_thread/thread/3a030be701ba938c

2. Once installed, GfW will take care of all of its own updates. By
default, GfW is set to check for updates periodically and if an update
is available, it will prompt the user and handle its own update - your
app doesnt need to do anything.

3. For local apps (installed on the same machine), you dont have to
supply a password. If you do supply a password (even for local apps),
then yes, the end user has to have that same password configured in
their GfW installation. 'Local apps' are those that communicate with
GfW over the loopback address of 127.0.0.1, so if you are targeting
GfW via a different address, then you will have to provide the
password as well. If you are using 127.0.0.1 and finding that it is
not working without a password, let me know and I will have a look as
that is not the intended behavior.

4. There is no way to configure the forwarding outside of the GfW
interface at this time. That said, if it was super duper important,
there might be a hacky way to achieve something similar since all of
the forwarding options are serialized to a file. You might be able to
duplicate that serialization and write to GfW's forwarding prefs file
directly, but I would not recommend it unless you were up for a large
challenge.

5. Although GfW is a Windows-only app, Growl on the Mac now (as of
v1.3) supports the same underlying protocol (GNTP), so if you are
using the GNTP-based Air connector library, it actually should work.
There were a few issues in Growl/Mac's initial GNTP implementation,
but I think they have ironed most of them out (with the exception
being encrypted notifications - those are not supported on the Mac
yet). I have not tried the Air connector and sending to Growl on the
Mac, but I have tried the Javascript/Flash connector, which is just a
wrapper around the Air/swf connector and the *does* work, so you might
be in luck. Then whole goal of the GNTP protocol was so that app
developers could write code once to send notifications and not worry
about what was receiving it (Growl, GfW, Snarl, etc).

Hopefully that answers your questions. Let me know if you have any
more or if I can clarify anything.

- brian

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[flexOnTheRocks]

@DitherSky

I was able to get it work (register and send notifications) without a password.

Hello Brian,

Thank you for the detailed information.

I was able to get it to work without a password, which was quite a relief.

On trying out a mac (Snow Leopard) with growl (1.2.2) it didnt seem to register the app.

Il need to check the behavior on a OSX Lion (since growl 1.3.3 is only available for the lion).

Thanks & Regards,

AJ

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[Brian Dunnington]

Yeah, on the Mac, Growl 1.2.2 definitely will not work with the Air
connector since 1.2.2 doesnt have any GNTP support at all. I have high
hopes for Growl 1.3+ on Lion though.

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[DitherSky]

It seems there were error in GNTP library that I use where MD5 was generated even for an empty password strings. After fixing it all working OK too. Though it is strange that Growl didn't ignore hash/salt part when password checking was disabled and just discarded those messages.

[Brian Dunnington]

> Though it is strange that Growl didn't ignore hash/salt part when password
> checking was disabled and just discarded those messages.

That is by design. Local apps dont have to provide a password, but if
they do (even if not required to), the password is checked and must be
valid. A local app cant just send in a bad password and have it work,
regardless of the password settings. In other words, the only valid
scenarios are:

1. Password not required and password not supplied
2. Password required or not required and a valid password is supplied

[DitherSky]

2. Password required or not required and a valid password is supplied

Seems kinda illogical to check password if it's disabled. But maybe I am overlooking something. 

[Brian Dunnington]

Nah, it makes sense. If you supply a password, it has to be right. (it
wouldnt make sense to accept a bad password either, though I am sure
you could argue either way).

anyway, i am glad you both got your integrations working. if you have
any more questions, i am always glad to help answer them.

[flexOnTheRocks]

Hello Brian,

I apologize, for the late reply. For some reason I felt I had already replied to the post. I tested it on growl (Mac OSX Lion) and it worked without any issues.

Thanks for the replies.

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[flexOnTheRocks]

Hello Brian,

Wanted to enquire about the growl detection that you mentioned in point 1.

Is checking the registry the only way to detect if growl is already installed?

Needed to confirm that, as Adobe AIR doesnt allow access to registry unless they are native applications( ie. a dmg build for MAC and an .exe build for windows),

which is hard to maintain.

On Tuesday, March 13, 2012 3:29:29 PM UTC-7, briandunnington wrote:

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[Brian Dunnington]

Checking the registry is just one way, and it is the way that the
built-in Detector class (in the .NET connector library) does the
check.

What methods do you have available to you from within AIR? You could
check for the existence of Growl.exe, but you would have to know where
it is installed (not all users install it to %PROGRAMFILES%\Growl for
Windows\Growl.exe). The registry works because it is a single location
to check.

If you let me know what types of techniques you can use, I could
probably come up with some suggestions as to how to detect Growl.

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 1:43 PM, flexOnTheRocks

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[flexOnTheRocks]

Adobe AIR allows access to the desktop directory, documents directory, user directory, application storage directory and the application directory (where the application is installed).

As you mentioned, checking for the existence of growl.exe might not be the best way as users might not always install it in the same path.

Sorry about the late reply.

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[Alan Montgomery]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:06:21 +0100, flexOnTheRocks
<ajitant...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Adobe AIR allows access to the desktop directory, documents directory,
> user
> directory, application storage directory and the application directory
> (where the application is installed).
> As you mentioned, checking for the existence of growl.exe might not be
> the
> best way as users might not always install it in the same path.
>
> Sorry about the late reply.
>

One way would be to send a GNTP register request. If this works (or gets a
GNTP error response) then something is handling GNTP requests - and you
don't really care what. If it fails then you can reasonably assume that
you need to install something - the alternative is it is installed but not
listening, which is abnormal and needs to be fixed.

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[Jason Plum]

"One way would be to send a GNTP register request. If this works (or
gets a GNTP error response) then something is handling GNTP requests -
and you don't really care what. If it fails then you can reasonably
assume that you need to install something - the alternative is it is
installed but not listening, which is abnormal and needs to be fixed. "

I would say that sending a notification would be best. In one method
you know:
a) If Growl is listening, if not then it needs
installed/started/troubleshooted
b) If you need to re-register your application