Pick of the week: Prowl

Sep 03

davidolrikPick of the week, Productivity , , , , No Comments

ProwlThis weeks pick is another iPhone app by the name of Prowl. Prowl promises to bring Growl from your desktop to your iPhone. When I first heard about Prowl I thought that this was surely the stupidest app ever! – Why on earth would you want your Growl notifications on your iPhone?1 The answer is you won’t2 – Prowl has an extensive API that will let you write scripts in numerous languages, including my all time favorite Perl, and this is where Prowl gets really interesting. This means you can get push-notifications from practically anything you can think of.

I once wrote an IRC notifier for Irssi that will message you via XMPP whenever someone highlights you or sends you a private message while you are disconnected from Irssi3.

It worked ok, but what I really wanted was a way where Irssi could connect directly to Growl and notify me whenever something interesting happens.

With Prowl all I need to send a push notification to my iPhone, is a small piece of code that looks something like this:

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#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use WebService::Prowl;

my $ws = WebService::Prowl->new(apikey => 'your personal apikey');
$ws->verify || die $ws->error();
$ws->add(
application => "Irssi",
event       => "Query",
description => "Joe: I like coffee",
priority    => 0,
);

So based on my old notifier program, I quickly whipped up an Irssi Prowl Notifier program 8-) So now I get notified with a push message whenever something interesting happens on IRC. There is even a WordPress plugin that will notify you whenever someone posts a comment on your blog.

Anything you can think of, Prowl can notify you about.

  1. Don’t get me wrong I love Growl and use it extensively. [↩]
  2. Well at least I won’t – I feel the Growl desktop notifications belong on the desktop. [↩]
  3. I run Irssi inside Screen so it will persist even when I logout of my account. [↩]

Irssi, Jabber & Adium

Feb 07

davidolrikTechnology , , , , 4 Comments

Irssi logoA while ago I switched from Colloquy to Irssi, and I haven’t looked back since – not even once.

While I really like this old-school text mode irc client, I do miss some of the nice features from Colloquy such as sounds and growl popups when highlighted.

I wanted to write an Irssi plugin that talks directly with “Growl”:http://growl.info/ on my laptop – but their protocol is UDP and not easy to tunnel through firewalls with ssh.

So I wrote a Jabber notifier plugin in Perl that lets Irssi talk to my Adium which supports sounds and Growl notifications.

Feel free to download and use it in your Irssi – You are running Irssi, aren’t you ?

iTerm redux

Oct 06

davidolrikPersonal , , No Comments

I have great news for all you new Mac convertiees who dislike Apples Terminal.app for one reason or another.

ITerm has just been released in version 0.9.0 – Lets just say that this version is a huge improvement over all the previous releases!

I have been using it for a day or so, and it hasn’t crashed once, it is much faster, the tabs have been improved Adium style, there is Growl support and all kinds other goodies!

If you tried it in the past and thought it was too unstable like I did – now is the time to try it again =)

Oh, and if you descide you like it you might like this one too…