Since iPhone OS 3.0 was released to the masses, there have been a number of applications trickling through that take advantage of the push notifications feature. However, very few of the apps have been of interest to me so far. What I’d really like to see is my favourite Twitter client, Tweetie, give me notifications when I receive @ replies or DM’s. I’m sure that will be a feature to come, but for now there is a very attractive alternative for receiving those notices if you have an iPhone (or iPod touch) running OS 3.0, a Mac and Growl.

Prowl is a Growl client for the iPhone. Notifications from your Mac can be sent to your iPhone via push. So, as soon as a Growl notification pops up on your Mac, Prowl will forward it to your iPhone or iPod touch. Prowl is highly configurable so you can decide which messages you want to be delivered. So maybe you want to be notified of @ replies through your twitter client, when your RSS feed reader has new items or when you are mentioned in a Group Chat in Adium. As long as your favourite application supports Growl, Prowl will support it right back.

prowl.jpg

Once you have downloaded and installed the Growl plugin on your Mac you can dive straight into the settings under ‘Display Options’ where you can pop in your Prowl username (register here) and choose the display notification settings. The installation instructions are pretty straightforward and can be found here. You can also set it to only send to Prowl when your computer is idle for X amount of time. Mine is currently set to 30 minutes.

Following the installation and set up on your Mac, download the Prowl iPhone app (iTunes link) for £1.79. You can configure the app in Settings to give you badges, alerts and sounds, under the Notification menu. Full instructions on how to configure the iPhone app can be found here, along with a list of FAQ’s.

Follow my blog with bloglovin