A bit of background

Growl is a widely used Mac OS X back­ground ser­vice, that you can ins­tall and confi­gure to dis­play small noti­fi­ca­tion bubbles in a cor­ner of your screen whe­ne­ver some­thing hap­pens. You can be noti­fied of new mails, twit­ter noti­fi­ca­tions, new wifi net­works net­work beco­ming avai­lable, a tor­rent down­load being com­ple­ted…
In short, and thanks to many application's built-in support, command-line access, or extras, almost any­thing you would want to be noti­fied unob­tru­si­vely about.

What Prowl offers you now is the pos­si­bi­lity to push any of these Growl noti­fi­ca­tion from your desk­top as a push noti­fi­ca­tion to your iPhone. As you can ima­gine, the ways you can use it are many, and are not limi­ted to desk­top noti­fi­ca­tions thanks to a few extras we’ll des­cribe here. (Pic­ture from Prowl web­site)

How to Setup

Here is what we have setup so far, to keep the ser­vice both rele­vant and useful.

First, create an account on Prowl's registration page, and then download the app on the AppStore. Launch it once to enter your user­name and password.

You will then need to ins­tall the desk­top part of Prowl, that exists as a growl plu­gin on Prowl's installation page

You could now setup Growl to dis­play any noti­fi­ca­tion using Prowl, but we think that would be a mis­take.
Growl can be chatty, and you don’t want every single noti­fi­ca­tion pushed to your phone.

In the Growl pre­fe­rence pane, under Appli­ca­tions, you will find a list of every appli­ca­tion that has sent some noti­fi­ca­tion to growl in the past. Choose the appli­ca­tions you would like to be noti­fied of, and click Confi­gure…

You can either for­ward all noti­fi­ca­tion, by going to Appli­ca­tion Set­ting, and choo­sing Dis­play Style: Prowl, or go into even more detail by going into Noti­fi­ca­tions, and choo­sing what events to be Dis­played as Prowl.

Now, go to Dis­play Options, and confi­gure Prowl with the user­name and pass­word you’ve cho­sen on Prowl’s site.

You can also choose refine what to dis­play, and if you want to also dis­play Prowl noti­fi­ca­tion on your desk­top in this page.

You should be all setup for Prowl now, click Pre­view, and test…

Sensible Usage

— Twit­ter.
You don’t want to receive noti­fi­ca­tions every time a new update from the people you fol­low is avai­lable. Chances are you are more inter­es­ted by men­tions and direct mes­sages. That’s cool, because In Tweetie, our desk­top client of choice, you are offe­red a fine setup allo­wing, you to be noti­fied with just the type of events you’re inter­es­ted in :

And if you use mul­tiple accounts, you can even fine tune noti­fi­ca­tions for each of them.

— Omni­fo­cus
Omni­fo­cus for iPhone does not have Push noti­fi­ca­tions yet, but it does include Growl noti­fi­ca­tions for Due items, and that’s all we need for this setup.

— Ser­ver Moni­to­ring
Here we used a rather convo­lu­ted setup to ans­wer all of our needs.

First what we need to do is open up Growl’s pre­fe­rence pane again, and go to Net­work.
there you will acti­vate “Lis­ten for inco­ming noti­fi­ca­tions”, and “Allow remote appli­ca­tion regis­tra­tion” and choose a pass­word you’ll put also in your script.

Open up on your Growl server’s fire­wall the fol­lo­wing ports:
TCP 23052 and UDP 9887, only for your server’s IP.

Yes we know that’s not quite secure yet, but we’re refi­ning that also.

Then, on each of our Linux Hos­ted ser­vers, we ins­tal­led a ruby gem, "ruby-growl"

We then wrote a very simple noti­fi­ca­tion script, shown just here :

#!/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'ruby-growl'
 
growl_server = YOUR_GROWL_SERVER_HOSTNAME
growl_password = YOUR_GROWL_SERVER_PASSWORD
source = ARGV[0]
title = ARGV[1]
message = ARGV[2]
 
g = Growl.new growl_server, "Server monitoring", [source], nil, growl_password
g.notify source, title, message

It’s quite quick and dirty, but it gets the job done, we’ll add veri­fi­ca­tion and sanity checks in the coming days :)

Now you have to regis­ter the appli­ca­tion to Growl, by using it at least once. name the file you crea­ted on your ser­ver notification.rb for example, and call it :

chmod +x notification.rb
./notification.rb "Apache monitor" "This is a test for apache monitor" "This is the message's content"

Test. The mes­sage should be dis­played on your desk­top. ain’t that cool.

Now, do not for­get then to go back to Growl’s pre­fe­rence pane, in the Appli­ca­tions Tab and setup this newly crea­ted appli­ca­tion (should be named “Ser­ver moni­to­ring” as per the id given in the script)
Set it up with the “Prowl” dis­play Style.

Test again. You should receive the noti­fi­ca­tion. ain’t that even cooler.

An alter­na­tive would be to directly notify Prowl, using a script they’ve developed and made available, prow.pl.

But that would not dis­play a noti­fi­ca­tion on your desk­top machine, as we want to, so that is a no go for us. The point in this setup is to have the server’s alerts dis­played both on our iPhones, and all our macs.

That’s only the tip of the ice­berg, and we only have used this ama­zing app for a day.
We will add more use cases as we think of them (or as you tell us your ideas !)