Boxcar Growl Plugin Not Working?

May 24, 2011 by Stephen Leave a Comment

Push notifications on the iPhone and iPad were a great idea, but the implementation stinks. All too often, I have to dismiss multiple notifications before I can actually use the device, and it’s difficult to customize which notifications show or beep me. That’s why I’m enjoying B0xcar, a push notification service for iOS devices (and soon for Mac desktops, too!) But I just couldn’t figure out how to configure the Growl plugin for Boxcar until now!

The Boxcar plugin for Growl is a great idea, allowing notices on the Mac to be forwarded to an iOS device on the go. But when I downloaded and installed the plugin, nothing seemed to happen. It asked if I wanted to configure the plugin and opened the “Applications” tab in Growl’s System Preferences but didn’t show up there. And I wasn’t getting notifications. What gives?

The two Growl plugin support pages at Boxcar.io were less than helpful. But I finally figured it out: I was looking in the wrong place.

The Boxcar plugin is a “display” not an “application”, so it shows up under the “Display Options” tab, not the “Applications” tab in Growl on Mac OS X. The plugin installation automatically opens the wrong tab!

Now that I have that fixed, I can move on with configuring Growl to notify my iOS devices for system events. And I can experiment with the new Boxcar application for Mac OS X. Sweet!

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