Thoughts about Growl for iPhone: GriP, Prowl and push notification of your gmail account

Update 2009-9-20:

Thanks for Chris’s simple python code! It is working beautifully.

All I have to do is uploading the python script to my 24/7 server. Start a screen process, and run it by “python gprowl.py”.

I guess because his code is in an early stage. I did a little modification to suite my need.
* I directly enable my key = apiKey instead of raw_input
* I directly enable my uname = username instead of raw_input

I saw the following post from Lester Chan’s blog.

1. Get Prowl from App Store for USD $2.99
2. Register your Prowl account at http://prowl.weks.net/register.php
3. Once registered, click on Settings Tab
4. Under API key, click on Generate API Key Button and note copy down your generated API Key
5. Download the required files in a zip
6. Extract the zip file which you have downloaded from Step 5
7. You should see a folder called gmail_and_prowl
8. Open the file main.py using NotePad
9. You should see these lines on line 11 to 13:

prowl_apikey = “your_prowl_api_key”
          IMAP_USERNAME = “your_gmail_username”
          IMAP_PASSWORD = “your_gmail_password”

10. Replace the text your_prowl_api_key, your_gmail_username and your_gmail_password accordingly and save it
11. Using your FTP, upload the folder gmail_and_prowl to your home directory in your webserver
12. Login using SSH and browse to the path where you uploaded gmail_and_prowl, for example, /home/username/gmail_and_prowl/
13. Type this command:

nohup python main.py > /dev/null 2>&1 &

14. The PID of the process which is executing the script will be displayed. You may want to know that number down, just in case you need to kill the process.
15. You can now log out from the SSH and send a test email to your Gmail account

What he is trying to do is getting instant notification when a new email arrived in his gmail account.

For iPhone, Exchange Server and Yahoo Mail support push, but not Gmail. However, Gmail’s IMAP protocol supports IDLE, which is ideal for “push” email.

So, for iPhone to get pushed gmail: a server is running 24/7 to get notification from gmail server via IMAP IDLE, and the server notifies iPhone via Apple’s Push Notification service. To achieve the last step, it is where the Prowl comes in.

Prowl is a Growl client for the iPhone. But, with Push, its capability can be expended infinitely!

The method described above, was initially discussed on cocoaforge by joshua.menke, and later crimsontwo wrote up the detailed how-to on xSellize forum. In that post, crimsontwo mentioned another Growl client for iPhone, Grip.

It is still beta and requires jailbreaked iPhone. I have one and installed it. Like its feature so far.

Comparing to Prowl, Grip is more like a pure Growl for iPhone.

If you are not familiar with Growl but you are using Mac, I would say you are so old. Download it now and use it. I am sure you will like it.

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications. (Nearly every application under the sun supports Growl.)

What are notifications?

Notifications are a way for your applications to provide you with new information, without you having to switch from the application you’re already in.

…

It would be nice if someone could release a free app has the ability to receive Push Notification … then we could hook it up with Grip !!!!