Pick of the week: Prowl
Posted on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 in Pick of the week
This 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? ((Don't get me wrong I love Growl and
use it extensively.)) The answer is you won't ((Well at least I
won't - I feel the Growl desktop notifications belong on the
desktop.)) - 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 [intlink
id="417" type="page"]IRC notifier for Irssi[/intlink] that will
message you via XMPP whenever someone highlights you or sends you a
private message while you are disconnected from Irssi ((I run Irssi
inside Screen so it will persist even when I logout of my
account.)). 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: [cce
lang="perl"]#!/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, );[/cce] So based on my
old notifier program, I quickly whipped up an [intlink id="1214"
type="page"]Irssi Prowl Notifier[/intlink] 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.