Prowl, a Growl Client for iPhone
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I discovered Prowl over breakfast this morning and couldn't resist trying it out.
Prowl is a Growl client for iPhone. Notifications from your Mac can be sent to your iPhone over push, with a full range of customization.
With the launch of iPhone 3.0 OS, we’ve finally seen the delivery of much-needed push notifications from Apple. With push notifications, you can get instantly notified of events, alarms, etc.
As soon as a Growl notification pops up on your Mac, Prowl will forward it to your iPhone or iPod Touch over the push notification service. Which notifications are pushed is configurable, allowing only the important messages to be delivered.
Installation is strait forward and requires,
- installing the app on your iPhone
- installing Growl on your Mac (if not already done)
- creating a Prowl account (this can be done from your iPhone too)
- downloading and installing the Prowl plugin for Growl
- configuring which events you want to receive on your iPhone (e.g. filter events by priority)
The only drawback is that Growl needs to be running. If your Mac is turned off, so are the notifications… (sic).
Nevertheless, this is a cool little app to play with that opens many possibilities (like bringing the notifications back to Twitter until @atebits implements it on Tweetie).
Note: be aware that the push notification places a drain on the battery's reserves. Complaints are rising in Apple's support forums for all iPhone models (typically less than 10 hours for an iPhone 3G, less than a day for a 2G). Curiously, push mail notification from MobileMe doesn't affect the battery all that much from my personal experience. The next update should address this issue