Prowl (version 1.1.5) is an iPhone Growl client. For those who are familiar or not familiar, Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X for various applications to notify the user of events such as when a download is complete, a twitter direct message, network connections, etc. Thanks to Zac West, a computer science student from Florida who helped give the world Adium. Prowl itself is a simple application that keeps a list of the recent push notifications received. A new feature is the redirect rules, that allows you to redirect a push notification to open another iPhone app. A quiet hours option allows you to silence notifications, and just updated badge counters.
Since there is an API for Prowl, the possibilities are endless. Want to monitor your server? Want to be notified when a user makes comments on your site? It can all be done easily with the API, available in various languages. One great example is called Prey Fetcher, which allows you to get pushed @mentions and DMs from Twitter right to your phone. So you don’t have to be constantly checking twitter if your an addict like me. Another service is called GVMax, which allows SMS sent to your Google Voice account to be pushed directly to your iPhone with Prowl.
You can use this as a cheap man’s SMS if your carrier charges exorbitant rates (.15 cents per received) like mine, then this makes sense for people to get in touch with you. Just a create a simple HTML Text Area PHP page hooked up to your Prowl API key and send it to all your friends, they can get can get a hold of you easily and for free. (Contact me for the source code)
For $3 on the App Store, this is a steal.
