OS X Notifications To Growl For Mac

Rumor has it Apple will soon release a notification system tailored for OS X. Something much like an iOS notification system. While this one should be an alternative to Growl for Mac, users are reluctant about the change for OS X notifications to Growl.

The Growl on MAC notification system has been around for a while. Aside from the fact that users got… used to it, it is so highly customizable that any other system could hardly beat it. Through time, the developers of Growl added a wide range of extensions and plugins, most of them coming as third-party features. The result? A mature OS X notification to Growl system you just don’t want to give up on.

It is well-known that the iOS notification system lacks such third-party cool extras that users absolutely love. What would be the chance that their future OS X notification system would make any exception from the rule? All these alone are more than enough to make you notice how Prowl and Growl will continue to team up invincibly.

So let us put Prowl under scrutiny and allow you to discover, in case you didn’t do it by now, all those great things it can help you with.

A short intro to Prowl and its features

Like mentioned, this is a dedicated Growl for Mac plugin. Its main goal is to push Mac OS X notifications to Growl on iOS. Despite the simple concept behind Prowl, the impressive range of customization options it comes with is highly praised.

If you want to configure your Prowl plugin, you just need to access Growl’s preferences panel. Once in there, you should be able to adjust settings regarding the context in which Prowl should push notifications.
- For instance, you could decide how often or how rare should Prowl push you notifications, depending on how much you’re working on your computer.
  - That’s extremely useful because, if you are sitting on your Mac all day long, you will obviously not need to get notifications on your iPad or iPhone.
  - If, on the other hand, you’re on the go for an entire day, getting notifications more often will come in handy.
- Additionally, you could decide what kind of notifications you want to get. That way, you are separating different types of notifications by their priority and opt to receive only those labeled as high-priority notifications;
  - For instance, you could select the so-called “Moderate” threshold, and Growl will only push critical notifications alerts.
- What’s even best, Growl in conjunction with a plugin like HardWare Growler could let you know of any power failures in your home. Say the power is off and the Mac switches to the UPS? You’ll know it the second it happens!

Configuring Prowl for the web

Working with Prowl will first require configuring it on your Mac. Nevertheless, the web configuration part is just as important. That’s because the web is the environment that makes pushing all these notifications possible.

Whenever a condition selected by you is triggered, the computer will send the information to the cloud. Then, the cloud will notify any of your other iOS devices. Speaking of these devices, they require a configuration as well – they must be registered with the service and run the iOS Prowl app, which will cost you $2.99.

Customizing the iOS devices

Once you’ve installed the dedicated iOS application, you can and you should start having fun with all the customization options it provides. Feel free to think of this one as Prowl’s centralized log.

The app stores a detailed history of all the notifications you have received, even after you dismissed them. Moreover, it also gives you extra control:

You can set Quiet Hours, time frames when you do not want to be disturbed with any kind of messages;
You can decide what notifications to be redirected to what specific applications – when you tap on a notification related to a certain app it will open up within that app;
You can quickly adjust particular notifications by toggling a special setting of do-not-disturb;

And with the custom URLs feature built-in, the entire experience should be similar to the one of the Launch Center and is great to have OS X notifications to Growl.

Other great features of Prowl that you need to know

So far, we suggested that getting notified whenever a script fails or a backup is performed are cool Prowl features. But there’s a lot more about it that you really need to know:

Email triggers – when you create your Prowl account, you automatically receive access to a ProwlMail email account. Thanks to it, you will benefit from unique Google Voice Prowl notifications support.

URLs to iOS – with Prowl you can directly send specific URLs to your iOS devices; for this function, it uses the 2Prowl Safari Plugin. It just takes one toolbar button to do the sending, once the free API key was generated by the plugin. If you activate this option, you should be able to open that URL in the Safari browser.

Simplenote – WordPress communication – if you have a habit of posting on WordPress notes taken on Simplenote, you can receive a report every time you do so. Whether it all went smoothly or the server isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do, you will always have an insight on the outcome.

Additional Prowl plugins – with the right scripts you can get all kinds of amazing features such as: monitoring particular websites and receiving alerts when problems occur on those websites; getting personalized WordPress notifications; getting Skype alerts and so on. Shortly put, any application or any script capable of delivering a Growl message will easily become a Prowl application.

Not tempted by the possibility of getting notifications when your favorite website is down? Not even by seeing who commented on your WordPress website? Perhaps all the other tools and plugins listed on the Prowl website will catch your eye.

Aside from all of the above, Prowl scores points for its great privacy policy too. At times, it might feel weird to see how much information that you cannot control goes through Prowl. But thanks to its privacy policy, which is very straightforward and easy to understand, all users can relax and just enjoy using Prowl.

To top it off, Growl on Mac is open source, which means that any developer has access to it. Any developer can support and extend its database, add new features, implement new functions. This can only guarantee that Growl is going to remain the rage even when Lion Mountain Notifications will hit the market.