MARK EVERITT  Or you could go into the settings panel and untick "Check for updates automatically".

It's no win for developers sometimes. This one has obviously tried to do us all a favour by checking for updates, which I appreciate very much. You can't please everybody so they've rightly included the option to turn this off. With this utility you have to do some customisation to get it as you like anyway so is it really that much time out of your day? You could have done it in a tenth of the time it took you to write your review.  
(Version 1.2)

CHRISTOPHER FORSYTHE  There is no way to detect a full screen movie. If there was we'd have a pref for that. But there isn't.

If you're getting constant update notifications, you likely have 2 versions of Growl installed, or an old version of Growl installed.  
(Version 1.2)

CHRISTOPHER FORSYTHE  Oh and downloading and installing silently is bad. We'd get a ton of bad feedback about that if we did it.

We are looking at Sparkle though.  
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CHRISTOPHER FORSYTHE  I'd like to hear more about accessability and what we can do. If you have any feedback please ping us on the discuss mailing list.

Chris  
(Version 1.2)

CHRISTOPHER FORSYTHE  Or just go download the update to GrowlMail. Go to the Growl site and download the GrowlMail download.  
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YOGI COACH  I'm a big fan of Growl, but find the Herald software more useful than GrowlMail for my purposes. It's free, well thought-out and highly configurable. And it works great with Mac OS X 10.6.2.  
(Version 1.2)

LIVINGS124  If you don't keep your OS up to date, why do you need to keep your software up to date?  
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CASTLE ROSE  @LIVINGS124: Either you missed my point or you're a smart azz. Mac OS X 10.4.x 'Tiger' was released on April 29, 2005, not so long ago. Further more, the PowerBook G4 I use for my business is not supported by Mac OS 10.6.0 'Snow Leopard'. All of my Adobe products, Quark, FTP, browsers, fonts, utilities, widgets, drivers, communication programs, ect. work great as is. I have not found a compelling reason to even update to Leopard just to get some more bells and whistles I don't need. As a small business owner i have to weigh the costs and benefits of each expense. Sadly I often I find business tend to forget the SERVICE in their customer service. Of course Growl is freeware/domationware and I greatly appreciate the work they do. I just hope if there are any bugs or security issues with the Tiger version they will continue to be patched. I could go on but i hope my point is clear now. -Thanks.  
(Version 1.2)

LIVINGS124  Supporting the OS for 4.5 years seems more than enough to me. 1.1 still works fine. Should they stop adding more advanced new features so that your old system that does not support this functionality can have a couple of not as interesting new abilities? If you do not want to upgrade your OS for new bells and whistles, then don't complain you can't update your open source software for more bells and whistles.  
(Version 1.2)

CHRISTOPHER FORSYTHE  To be frank, we have 3 developers and 1 project manager working on Growl. 1 of those is a full time student. The other is a full time developer at a prestigious mac shop. The last is a full time doctor.

So we have one guy who can work on Growl for maybe 5 hours a month (doctor). Another guy who can work on Growl 10 hours a week (dev) , and the last guy can do the same (student). I can work on Growl roughly 10 hours a week as well (project manager).

When considering what we could and could not support, based on the fact that the Growl project is entirely volunteer supported, we had to make judgement calls. 10.4 was released over 4 years ago. No new hardware supports it. Very few of us have a box to test on, and it makes the testing process go much longer. The testing process for 1.1 itself got extended another month due to 10.4.

So just on a testing basis alone did we think about dropping 10.4.

Then you have to consider maintenance of code. There is a large amount of code that we were able to remove and stop maintaining once we dropped 10.4. The ability to do this made the codebase smaller, and easier to read.

Finally, it is hard to work with old API's.

It is unreasonable to expect unpaid volunteers to work on something they do not want to work on. Period. I've forced people to do that before when I worked as the Project Manager of Adium. We needed Group Chat support, and I basically told one guy to do it or else. He did it, then he quit the project. People stop working on things if they are forced to do something they don't want to do.

Let me put it another way. Supporting 10.4 is like supporting ie 6. You can do it, but why? For a group of people with barely a lot of time, it's not worth doing it.

I hope this explanation helps. By the way, livings works on another mac app. Saying "it's not that old!" is not a good argument for either of us. We both have to make judgement calls based on cold hard fact and not emotion. I simply don't have the resources to support 10.4 at the prefpane and extras level, and I'm sure the argument to livings doesn't really shine through compared to resources either.

Open source projects are supposed to be fun. Threads like this make it not fun. Come up with a better argument for 10.4 support that addresses all my points and more and we'd maybe rethink it, but currently 10.4 support for the prefpane and extras is gone and won't be returning.

I hope this helps you understand our reasoning.

Chris  
(Version 1.2)

LIVINGS124  This is a result of Firefox building in an old version of Growl.  
(Version 1.2)

CHUCKK  Yea, they should be more careful. But on the other hand, the installer for this version is smart enough to recognize the OS and it will not all you to install if you are running Tiger (well at least it did that on my machine).  
(Version 1.2)

CHRISTOPHER FORSYTHE  The updater really isn't very good right now, agreed. We're currently switching to sparkle at the moment which will take care of that. Sorry about the problem, not much we can do about it at this time though.  
(Version 1.2)