Using Growl for host notifications on the iphone

We’ve used SMS notifications for some time to notify me when something breaks on one of the servers we manage/look after. SMS is good, but here’s something better.

While I was wondering how many credits I have left with Kapow, Peter suggested we use Growl and iPhone push notifications instead. A quick investigation showed we can…. (Growl notifications are push and free… which appeals to me).

A quick read, found a command line Python library (http://github.com/jacobb/prowlpy/blob/master/example.py) and obviously the Prowl application on the iphone. A one off charge of £1.79, and free notifications for life.

As a further bonus, Growl notifications can have a classification (and associated sound/vibrate on the phone) so I can have e.g. ones from super-important-customer waking me up in the middle of the night with a siren noise, and others silent. Finally, the Prowl client supports the notion of ‘quiet hours’ when it can suppress noises.

Prowl Growl FTW!


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

2 responses to “Using Growl for host notifications on the iphone”

  1. David Goodwin Avatar

    Now I just have to avoid using DBus + Pidgin to get notifications all the time…

    ( http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/DbusHowto )

  2. David Goodwin Avatar

    Oh, and a Growl notification can contain up to 10,000 characters. Seems a bit excessive, but a viable means to distribute substantial content.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *