Prowl – The power of Push

The first thing I think I should point out about this app is that by itself it is useless.  That’s right – useless.  You’ll need Growl (Mac or Windows) for you computer.  Now that we’ve established that, let’s talk about all the things that Prowl can do for you.  It will receive push notifications from your computer.  That’s all it does.  All right, so let’s talk about the things that it can allow to happen!

I’ve established that Prowl is useless on its own.  What else do you need?  Growl, of course.  Growl is a free application for your computer, and don’t worry – Growl is for Mac or Windows.  I know that I usually don’t like to stray away from what the iPhone app does but this time I have to.

Notification History

Growl is the powerhouse because of the abilities of Prowl.  Growl is what is going to turn your computer into the push notification powerhouse it can be.  All right, I think I’m getting too excited here.  Deep breath.  It just occurred to me that Growl itself is really only a tool for other applications to use.  So we’re really going to be talking about a chain of apps working together to get information to your iPhone.  Prowl is on your iPhone listening for notifications from Growl on your computer, which is in turn listening for notifications from applications and plugins.  This begs the question: What applications and plugins?

Settings Screen

Well currently for Windows (through the Growl for Windows website) you can get applications for Gmail, Facebook, Pandora, Email, RSS feeds, Google Wave, system resource monitoring, Twitter and much more.  As you can see, there are a good number of good options.  There is, of course, a down side.  Your computer has to be on and you must be logged in if you have multiple accounts.  This wasn’t a big issue for me but might be for some of you out there.

I know I didn’t really talk about the features of Prowl yet.  Well, you can set quiet hours which is awesome!  You can also set different sounds based on the priority of the alert.  Not really sure when that comes into play, though.  All in all I would recommend getting this, because only paying $2.99 once and getting push notifications from all of those programs saves you money!

Cost: $2.99

What I thought in a nutshell!
Use-ability
How user friendly is the app and its interface?
Practicality
How likely is it that someone is going to use it?
Neat Factor
Will this app wow you?

Overall
How did it fair overall?