keep growl running

[Andrew Gearhart]

Morning folks,

I'm getting ready to use growl across the board on our PCs for sending notifications from various places in our infrastructure, however, my initial testing has revealed one major flaw... if Growl isn't running... the user doesn't get the message.

While that may seem obvious... the problem is that I never expected that to be a regular occurrence. I check the box and say "run at startup" and it should always be there, right? Well... no.

Seems when my users, good as they are, get a notification about updates, they do them. Then what happens? Growl isn't running anymore. Boo.

I've not had any reports of anything other than that being the cause on our network, however, I can't be sure with the other folks that are running into problems with growl operation ceasing.

While I did come up with an exceedingly convoluted way of keeping Growl running with the task schedule and two or three other applications... to make Growl the truly useful application that I was hoping it would be, I need a way to discern if growl is running at the target. I also want a way to be able to make sure that Growl is running on the PC. Something like a service that checks if Growl is running and if it isn't... starts it. Would be great if it also would send a growl someplace (like to me) that says that it wasn't running and that it started it.

Anybody have a better solution than the one that I posted previously?

Cheers,

Andrew

[Brian Dunnington]

i have only thought about this for about 30 seconds, so this idea may
turn out to be half baked, but GfW can also be launched from a url.
the method to install displays and language packs uses a url scheme
like:

growl:display*http://someurl.here

when a url like that is encountered on the client, the OS will launch
GfW. (if GfW is already running, it will not start a second instance).

the trick would be a way to get the url to be triggered on the client.
if you had some kind of separate app to trigger it, you really could
probably just launch the .exe directly, so i am not sure it makes life
any easier. maybe this will spark an idea from someone else though
that will lead to a good solution.

(the longer term solution is to make GfW relaunch itself after an
update, but i have not gotten that part done yet, so it doesnt help
you today).

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[Andrew Gearhart]

on trying that suggestion... another option... seems that if I just run growl.exe... that runs growl if it isn't... and I simply get the "Growl is Running" message if it is... /and/ ... it doesn't clear the stickies...

Is there a way to start growl silently (command line option to run w/o "Growl is Running")? That would seem to allow for starting growl from the task scheduler... though, I don't know what the actual implications are here... is this the most efficient way of doing this?

Cheers,

A

[Brian Dunnington]

launching Growl.exe from a scheduled task should be just fine. (that
is all the growl: protocol handler does behind the scenes).

as for the 'Growl is running' notification, that one is trickier. when
you start Growl normally (and it was not already running), that
notification lets you know it has started properly. if you forget
Growl is running and try to launch it again, that notification lets
you know it is now running as well. if it was already running and you
didnt know it and you manually tried to launch it again and nothing at
all happened, that would be confusing.

however, i have been considering adding something like a '/silent'
switch like you mentioned that could be passed to Growl.exe that would
suppress the startup notification. this would still allow feedback to
normal users who launch Growl the normal way, but automated task or
users who knew enough to modify their shortcut could specify a
different behavior. i think that would work for you quite nicely, but
it has the itsy-bitsy drawback of existing only as an idea in this
post and not in a shipping version of Growl.

if you really wanted, you could compile Growl from the source and
comment out the one line that sends the 'Growl is running'
notification when Growl is already running, but i dont know if that is
something you want to dive into. you could pass the '/silent' switch
from your task scheduler task anyway, and someday when the user
updates to a version of Growl that supports this, it will just start
working (see the proposed syntax below).

otherwise, i dont have a better answer based on the current restrictions. sorry.

Growl.exe /silent:true


On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Andrew Gearhart

[Joel "Jaykul" Bennett]

> but it has the itsy-bitsy drawback of existing only as an idea in this
post and not in a shipping version

Epic.

--
Joel "Jaykul" Bennett
http://HuddledMasses.org

[Brian Dunnington]

> Is there a way to start growl silently (command line option to run w/o
> "Growl is Running")?

i snuck this into the bug-fix version of GfW that i just put out
(v2.0.1), so now you can do this:

growl.exe /silent:true

and the 'Growl is running' notification will not show up.

[Andrew Gearhart]

mmmm... thank you. will try it tomorrow morning.

cheers, A