[ANN] Future of GrowlMail and GrowlTunesPlugin

[Christopher Forsythe]

Folks,

To continue the ongoing discussion regarding changes for 1.3, here is the next bit of information which is now pretty solid and can be announced.

From now on, GrowlMail and GrowlTunesPlugin will be developed by Rudy Richter. Rudy has worked on The Growl Project since 2004. This change is due to a decision to help eliminate things which fully distract from the goals of The Growl Project. GrowlMail will be here from now on, including releases and support. Be aware that should Rudy decide that GrowlMail is no longer maintainable, that he wants it to be 10.7 only, that he wants to charge for it, or anything else, that's his decision. At this point GrowlMail is no longer part of The Growl Project other than to provide a download for the plugin until he's ready.

https://github.com/rudyrichter/GrowlMail

The future of GrowlMail is fully in Rudy's very capable hands. Once Rudy is fully ready, we'll change the GrowlMail page to reflect this change in the direction of plugin. 

GrowlTunesPlugin is also moving to github under Rudy's control, here:

https://github.com/rudyrichter/GrowlTunesPlugin

GrowlTunesPlugin is not GrowlTunes. It is a yet unreleased plugin for iTunes and was to replace GrowlTunes. However, it was never released. Hopefully Rudy can get this guy released after 10.7 comes out.

Hopefully these changes mean that going forward, The Growl Project can better focus on working on Growl and the Extras that remain with the project, and that GrowlMail and GrowlTunesPlugin get the focus that they need as well. This change should help everyone as far as I'm concerned. Those who wait for months for updates to GrowlMail upon every os x release should be very aware that any change to help with productivity here is a good thing.

Chris Forsythe

Growl Project Lead

[Rudy Richter]

The status at this point is that I have GrowlMail initially working
under 10.7, it turned out to be a little bit more work than just
adding the Message and Mail UUID entries into the plist (though that
appears to still be required). Notifications work and click callbacks
both work at this point. I will be spending the next day or so going
through and verifying that all the summary mode and mailbox and mail
account filtering behave as expected. Subsequent to getting this
release out GrowlMail will start picking up some new features as well
as closing out some long standing tickets that have been sitting in
the growl ticket tracker for years.

The plan at this point is to have a binary available as soon as Apple
posts 10.7, unless they do it tomorrow, in which case it might take a
day or so to get everything else sorted out.

There will also be a companion tool in the event you want to be
entirely cutting edge and are running pre-release versions of the OS.
It is currently titled GrowlMailUUIDPatcher, it will update the UUIDs
in the plist and relaunch Mail.app for you. Ultimately you should
only do this if you're willing to accept that GrowlMail might not work
and are able to provide feedback regarding the failure.

I will be setting up a google group to handle support/issues and there
is a ticket tracker on the github project page for anyone that wants
to file feature requests/bug reports.

any questions can be attached to this thread or you can ask me
directly via twitter http://www.twitter.com/rudyrichter

-rudy