Prowl: get Growl notifications on your iPhone, with push

If you use a Mac, you might be familiar with Growl, a system-wide notification system that allows apps to notify you of events - new email, new IMs, downloads finishing - with a customizable pop-up. Now Growl has been (sort of) ported to the iPhone as a great new app called Prowl. Prowl collects Growl alerts from your Mac for reading on your iPhone, and even includes push support. Effectively, this means that you can get push notifications on your phone from any Growl-compatible app on your computer.

The iPhone side of Prowl shows a nice clean list of all the notifications you've received, even if you don't have push activated. On the desktop side, Prowl is actually a Growl style, so you can assign it to the apps of your choice, or make it the default if you need to see every single notification on your phone. One of the uses of Prowl I was most excited about was pushing direct messages and replies from my desktop Twitter app. No Twitter app on the iPhone has push yet, so Prowl is a nice way to fill in the gaps.

Prowl does require you to have Growl installed, and you have to sign up for an account. The registration process is extremely quick, though, with just a username and password required.

Tags: growl, iphone, mac, notifications, prowl, push