Mac users have had their own notification platform for more than five years in the form of the open-source software Growl. Growl 1.3, released Monday, boasts a number of changes, including new features and new rules for development. But its most significant change may be the fact the utility is now available from the Mac App Store—and only the Mac App Store.

What’s in store

The end-user edition of the software will be sold through the store for $2.

“The general conclusion we came to is that we need to fund development going forward or that Growl would likely stop being developed altogether.”

But Growl’s presence in the store isn’t a death knell for the software as an open-source project. “Growl is definitely still open source,” Forsythe told Macworld

Despite the end product only being available through the Mac App Store, independent users will still be able to download and compile the source code from Growl’s site, as per the terms of Growl’s BSD license.

Feature presentation

“[Rollup] will display messages that came in while you were away,”

Rollup also paved the way for another feature: a History log

By visiting Growl’s History pane, one can revisit notifications that happened five minutes or five days ago

The times they are a changin’

utilities that previously came packaged with the Growl distribution will have to be spun off as their own applications or discontinued. The ever popular GrowlMail add-on has been picked up by Growl contributor Rudy Richter

GrowlTunes add-on, which hooks into iTunes, and the HardwareGrowler, which keeps users updated about hardware status, will follow Growl into the Mac App Store.

New life to live

the new version is still a major milestone in the history of the open-source Mac software project Read more at www.macworld.com