iPhone, Twitter and Push Notifications
So, everybody’s raving about the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0, me included, but that’s not what this post is about.
A few months ago I got tired of not having push notifications in Twittelator Pro and then I realized that since I had Prowl installed on my phone, there was absolutely nothing stopping me from pushing the notifications myself. After writing my own Twitter watch shell script and having used it for quite some time now, I present you: twatch.sh!
To use, just make sure you have prowl.pl and curl installed in /usr/local/bin (or adjust the paths) and create a ~/.twatch.rc containing login=”yourlogin” and password=”yourpass”. Also you need to have a ~/.prowl file containing your prowl API key.
The first time you use it will push the last few mentions. Now you just have to add it to your crontab. Tada!
Prowl is full of awesome
I read about prowl a few weeks ago, and quickly dismissed it as I believed it required growl sending him the alerts. Actually it doesn’t!
Here’s the description from the website:
Prowl is a Growl client for the iPhone. Notifications from your Mac (or even Windows! see the FAQ) can be sent to your iPhone over push, with a full range of customization and grace you expect.
Just go the the prowl website, create your account, log in, go to settings and generate your API key. Once you’re done, download the prowl client for iPhone (2.79E if I remember correctly) and start it once, it will register your phone on the website.
Now, download the CLI client here (not yet in ports) and start playing around!
Here are a few things you can do with prowl already: receive Nagios alerts, know when somebody’s talking to you on irssi, ...