Will GrowlyBird apps run on Mac OS 14 Sonoma?
Yes. All of our apps have been tested on Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite through Mac OS 14 Sonoma. If you find an issue, contact us right away so we can fix it.
We still have not bought in to the flat icons that Apple is so fond of, and we think the washed-out appearance and smashed toolbars that debuted in Mac OS 11 are a mistake that Steve Jobs would never have allowed. But that's just Chris talking.
All of our apps run natively on both Intel chips and Apple silicon.
Why won’t Mac OS 10.15 Catalina (and later) run old versions of GrowlyBird apps?
All apps that have a format panel (Notes, Write, Calculator, Draw, etc.) have an ancient bug which Catalina exposed. Upgrade to the latest versions, all of which are notarized by Apple so they will run without complaint on later versions of the OS.
Why does Notes ask me what I want to do when I restart it instead of remembering what notebooks were open?
You didn't actually quit Notes — you clicked the red button in the window title bar, which does not quit the app, it just closes all the notebooks. So when you clicked on the Dock icon for Notes, it was still running, and since no notebooks were open it asked what you wanted to do.
Use the Quit command (command-Q) to quit Notes. Then it will remember what notebooks were open.
Why did you take Growly Notes off the App Store?
There were several reasons.
- The restrictions that Apple places on App Store apps (primarily sandboxing) have confused users since version 2.0, and that always bothered us.
- Some features we wanted to add for version 4 were impossible in the sandbox.
- The trade-offs between flexibility, clarity, rapid response, features, and sales income finally tipped the other way.
Will you be developing mobile versions of your apps? iPad, iPhone, Android…?
We released an iPad version of Notes in June 2015 and it didn’t sell. That product has now been discontinued. We will not consider any other platform — we are an Apple-only shop — and we will not be offering mobile versions of any of our apps. Chris is good at Mac apps, so that’s what we do. Also, and we mean this in the most respectful way, iOS is a freaking nightmare to write serious apps for.
Why isn’t spell checking working in Growly Notes or Write?
Unless you’ve turned off automatic spell checking in the preferences for the app, this is always caused by incorrect settings in System Preferences. There's a very simple fix: find the spelling preferences in the GrowlyBird app and turn on "Use only your primary language." You can find more information in the app's help file.
There’s one more thing to know about Notes: spell checking is only done when you’re typing in the text note. Just click in the text and the spell check will start in the background.
Why did you remove PDF annotations and highlighting from Growly Notes?
In three different Mac OS updates (10.9, 10.11, and 10.12) Apple changed the rules for how apps display and annotate PDFs — and each change broke Notes, even though Notes did nothing wrong.
There is already an app on your Mac that is a PDF expert; it’s free, it’s easy to use, it’s more capable than Notes could ever be at working with PDFs, and Apple maintains it and ensures that it keeps on working. This app is called Preview. Notes doesn’t allow you to edit movies or JPEGs directly, and since PDFs are just as complex as these, Notes requires that you also edit them with a dedicated app.
Editing PDFs with Preview is easier and more powerful than the annotation features in Notes version 2. You still keep the PDFs in your notebook, but open them quickly and edit them smoothly in Preview. You don’t need to merge text or drawings onto the page, and it’s simple to change them anytime you want.
I’m using Growly Notes and the help notebook has vanished. Where can I find it again?
Choose Notes Help from the Help menu.
Does Growly Notes read OneNote® files?
No. The OneNote file format is messy and it would take way too much work to write an importer. Also, the Mac version of OneNote hides your files anyway, out in the cloud somewhere over the rainbow. To transfer your information from Windows OneNote to Notes, export it to .doc, .rtf, or .html and then import those files into Notes. To go from Mac OneNote to Notes your only options are copy/paste or exporting from OneNote to PDF.
In a very rare bit of convergent evolution, these are also the only ways of getting data from Apple Notes to Growly Notes. When I worked at Microsoft, the two companies could never agree on anything. I’m not sure if this is progress.
Where does Growly Notes store its files?
Everything is on your hard drive, or any other local drive you specify. Notes never stores anything — including your notebooks — in the cloud. However, if you save a notebook to the Dropbox or Google Drive folder, it will be copied out to the cloud in the usual way.
Does Growly Notes support iCloud?
No. There were technical reasons not to do so before, but now it’s really simple: only App Store apps can use iCloud. You can share notebooks between Macs using Dropbox, Google Drive, or any similar service; or with a network server, or any shared folder over WiFi.
Can Growly Notes or Write collapse text?
No. Outlining is a feature we deliberately left out of Write, and since Notes uses the same word processing engine, it can’t collapse text either. Both handle lists very well, but hiding text is not in our toolbox.
Why is your software free?
With the exception of Growly Notes, most or our apps were initially created years ago, for our own use, so the actual cost of offering them to you is very low.
Notes is more complicated. It was originally written to be a commercial product, but then we decided to make version 1 free. However, it took over two years of very hard work to develop version 2, and another two years for version 3, so we hoped to make some income by selling it. But the restrictions on App Store apps finally overcame the benefits in our mind, so now version 4 is free again.
We gladly accept donations, but you don’t need to pay anything, ever, to use our apps.
What's the catch?
We can't promise full-on tech support, although we try very hard to answer all questions within a day. We fix bugs as quickly as we can.
We don't have a large organization — actually we don’t have an organization at all, it's just Chris and Nancy and our pets, who really aren't very much help. Chris does all the development, product support, help files, and this website all by himself.
We use these apps ourselves, every day, so please report problems or suggest improvements. Contact us from the Help menu in any of our apps, or use the link at the top of any page on our site.
That’s it. There are no other gotchas.
Would you consider giving away your source code or making your apps open source?
Absolutely not. We love giving away our software but, to be honest, Chris is a total control freak. You can have the apps, but the code is his. Also, opening the source code would destroy the security of the password protection feature in the apps that support it, and we’re not willing to throw that away.
Now, if you want to buy the code, that's a different matter. But it won't be cheap, so don't think you can get the source code for Notes for $15 (which someone actually offered us once).
What are the system requirements for GrowlyBird apps?
All of our apps require an Intel or Apple Silicon processor, and Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite or later.
Are GrowlyBird apps 64-bit apps?
Yes, every one of them.
Do your apps support languages other than English?
Sadly, no. Lo siento, je suis désolé, es tut mir leid, я извиняюсь, すみません.
Although the user interface is only in English, all of our apps — Notes and Write in particular — can handle text in any language. However, these two apps do not support right-to-left scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew.
Why don’t you have support for other languages?
It’s really hard. The app has to be written from the start to allow the replacement at runtime of every single piece of text in it. But even worse, every dialog, and all the format panels in the apps that use them, have to be laid out by hand for every language, because some languages take more room to say the same thing than others do. (For example, “selection color” vs. “color de la selección”.) On top of that, you need a technical person who can translate “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that” (and thousands of other words and phrases) into each language. We don’t have anybody like that, and we don’t have the resources to do the other work. All of our technical work — including design and coding, product support, the help files, and this website — is done by one person.
Is my information safe with you? Are your programs safe?
You bet. We don't give away or sell email addresses. We don't have ads on our website or in our apps. Our apps do not collect any information about you or your computer. There are no viruses or worms in our software. We hate all of those things.
When we discover a bug we fix it as quickly as we can. If you'd like to help, let us know when you find a problem or have a suggestion by clicking the Contact Us link at the bottom of any page on our site. Or use the commands on the Help menu in each app.
What’s with the silly name?
We named our company after the nickname of our macaw, Peaches, who has a somewhat prickly personality. Sort of like our developer, now that we come to think of it.
Why don't you provide Windows versions?
We don't do Windows.
No, seriously, the real reason is that... we loathe Windows.
By the way, our apps also don’t run on Linux, any flavor of mobile device, IBM mainframes, your car, or your smart TV or refrigerator. We are a Mac-only shop.
OneNote and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp.