I bought the family pack of Snow Leopard prior to launch. And yet, for someone who has packed up and moved across the country as well as out of the country at a moment's notice, I am resistant to change. At least where my computer is concerned.
David Allison and Dr. Roach both upgraded immediately upon receipt and detail their process in separate posts:
UPGRADING TO SNOW LEOPARD by David Allison
Snow Leopard: One More Installation by Dr. Roach
In both cases, the upgrade didn't seem too problematic. I should have followed suit but the article that really deterred the upgrade for such a long time was EveryJoe's My Cost of Upgrading To Snow Leopard . The discovery that I might have to upgrade CS4 was too much. Upgrading from Tiger had forced me to Adobe CS3, causing the ripple of plugin and action upgrades that ate up the better part of a week. In September of 2009, I was not ready for the huge investment of time and money .
Now, 18 months later, I was ready for CS5, which meant I was ready for Snow Leopard. Both installs were seamless.
EXCEPT.
What is Growl and why is it installed on my mac?
Growl allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications. It's software that your software may depend on to pop open message windows on your mac, even if that software is running in the background. So when you see a message window that says "Download Complete" or " You have mail" while you are using Adobe Illustrator (for example), well, that is the Growl magic.
Adobe arbitrarily installs Growl on your mac when you install CS5. Yashodhan Gokhale, product manager for the Out Of Box Experience at Adobe, even wrote a blog post about it. How kind of him. It seems this was Adobe 's poorly planned strategy of better customer promotional interfacing. The point of installing Growl, he says, was to "remind users to claim their complimentary benefits for registering their product and to update their Adobe.com profiles. Complimentary benefits include things like “30 days of lynda.com online video training”, “PhotoTools 2.5 plug-in”, etc."
Adobe admitted that they may have overstepped their welcome on our computers by providing a step-by-step instructions to disable Adobe related notifications. Me? I want Growl gone. I am sure it is a fine app but I don't need it, don't want it and I resent big brother installing it on my machine.
Apparently, GROWL recognizes that paranoid freaks like me exists.
"We do not endorse applications installing Growl without your permission. In fact, we hate it. Nothing should ever install anything on your system without your knowledge and your explicit consent."
Growl's website makes available an uninstaller for our convenience.
Thank you Growl.
Now that I have worked myself into a lather, it turns out that Transmit, my ftp program of choice, uses Growl too. SInce the installation of the Adobe Suite, I have been seeing the Transmit notification windows appearing in the upper right hand corner of my screen. WHile Transmit worked just fine without it, I didn't realize I was taking advantage of these new notifications. Now I have to think about this. Do I need it? Do I mind that Adobe forced this on me?
hmmm.....
I personally do not want any application on my Mac that I didn’t put there. Adobe has finally gone way too far. They think that they’ve become microsoft and that is NOT a good thing.
Too bad – Adobe is going the way of Microsoft- please make it quick and get out of here. We don’t need you anymore anyway. You used to be a good and essential company. That was years ago, by the way.