Pick of the week: Prowl

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’t ² - 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 Irssi ³.

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:

#!/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 😎

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.