It was so geeky and personal, and you could make app notifications look like anything. The best part about Growl was the plethora of built-in and community-contributed skins. Or I can tell the latest design trends to go fuck themselves and build something stupid and silly and fun and delightful.ĭoes everyone remember Growl? It was a fantastic 3rd-party app notification framework for OS X that Apple aped Notification Center from.

I could let those things keep bothering me. 1 Apply and use in minutes 2Īnd so every time I have to tell Apple 'Not Now' when 'No' should be a choice, or when I have to guess where to hover the mouse to reveal what should be a call to action, I get frustrated. Speaking of which, did you know you can save 3% on all your Apple purchases with Apple Card. How much design and engineering effort has shifted from delighting users to finding new ways to interrupt their workflows with dark patterns leading to greater services revenue? It all feels gross. Modern software, with Apple leading the charge, feels…sterile. Making things look simple by hiding things doesn't actually make them simple.Īffordances, color, contrast, delineation - hell, even discernible buttons - have fallen out of favor in Apple's modern design language to a point where function often takes a backseat to form - especially on macOS.īut ignoring recent usability regressions in favor of clean-looking design, what kills me the most is how joy, personality, whimsy, fun, and goddam delight are lost in service to aesthetics. I believe Apple has fallen victim to a design fad where they unintentionally make software harder to use in their quest to simplify the design visually. On the surface, I complained about how difficult it is to interact with the Big Sur redesign of the menu bar and Notification Center alerts. Last year, I wrote two posts titled 240 Invisible Pixels and Surtainly Not.

If you don't have JavaScript enabled, you can Let's reskin Notification Center on macOS. Today, I want to show off a project so far along the joy side of that spectrum that it blows past being silly and borders on pure ridiculousness. As much as it is a job and source of income, for me, building software is also a way to relax, a form of self-expression, play, and in the best moments - joy.

Growl app on mac