Posts about Mac OS written by Christian. Initialize and format a virtual disk: How to add and remove a new virtual disk from a VM on VMware Workstation. Hands on: Using Apple's Workgroup Manager. Mac OS X Server's managed preferences allow administrators to define virtually the entire user experience and restrict user access to many types of. If there's still not enough room on your hard drive, check out our guide on how to completely uninstall apps on Mac OS X, which will show you how to not only get rid of an app, but all the files associated with it as well. #3: Close All Open & Menu Bar Apps. Heavier apps such as web browsers (looking at you Chrome) and movie editors use up a ton of system resources, leaving less available. Automating OS X backups. Formatt Hands-On Training Through a progressive case study, you gain practical experience integrating OS X desktops and servers into a Windows enterprise environment. Exercises include: Installing and configuring Mac OS X Server; Navigating the Mac OS X user interface; Running Windows virtual machines in OS X.
Growl, once a key part of the Mac desktop experience, is being retired after 17 years. Christopher Forsythe, who acted as project lead, announced the retirement in a blog post on Friday.
Launched in 2004, Growl provided notifications for applications on Macs (it was also offered for Windows) before Apple introduced its own Notification Center. Notification Center was added to macOS (then styled Mac OS X) in the Mountain Lion update in 2012, but it first debuted on iOS a year earlier.
And so it is with macOS Mojave, as Apple calls it, or macOS version 10.14, which arrives 17 long years after the initial release of Mac OS X. I’ve been using Mojave since the first developer.
Here's a snippet of Forsythe's announcement:
Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple's new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple's notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we're announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.
It's been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career. However at WWDC in 2012 everyone on the team saw the writing on the wall. This was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Ironically Growl was called Global Notifications Center, before I renamed it to Growl because I thought the name was too geeky. There's even a sourceforge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it.
He went on to recall that Growl was developed in part because popular messaging app Adium and IRC client Colloquy needed different types of notifications than were available at the time. Generally, developers were designing and implementing their own proprietary solutions for notifications, which were not always ideal experiences for users.
Advertisement When installed, Growl appeared in the Mac OS X system preferences pane, acting as the notifications service for the platform—that is, until the previously mentioned Notification Center debuted. As Forsythe noted above, the writing was on the wall as soon as Apple made that announcement.It seems Apple's new shift in architecture and other factors have led to the official sunsetting of Growl now, though Growl had been supported only at a basic level for some time.
After going in depth with iOS 14 earlier this week, today we focus on macOS Big Sur. The biggest takeaway from my hands-on time with the follow up to macOS Catalina is that Apple’s latest OS is clearly being designed with the future in mind.
Although it’s unmistakably Mac, Big Sur is a departure from previous versions of macOS in terms of aesthetics. Everything, from the dock, to the menu bar, to window chrome, icons, and even sounds have been updated.
A good overview of the many, many changes in Big Sur.
Interesting sidenote: with both Windows and macOS now heavily catering towards touch use, this leaves Linux – and most of the smaller platforms, like the Amiga or Haiku – as one of the last remaining places with graphical user interfaces designed 100% towards mouse input.
Big buttons, lots spacing, lots of wasted space – it’s coming to your Mac.