Full disclosure, I am friends with the developer of Howl.

I have been a Mac user for almost three and a half years now. One of the things I loved about OS X is the eye candy. In my opinion, the eye candy in OS X is unmatched. One of the great apps for eye candy is Growl. Growl is a notification system. It pops up a notification on your screen when compatible applications have something to report. If you have ever used Microsoft Outlook, it’s similar to the little window that pops up in the bottom right of your screen when you get a new e-mail. It doesn’t end with e-mail though. If you are using Adium you get IM notifications, sign on/off notices, etc. A lot of Twitter clients will do direct messages and even mentions.

To be honest, I had almost ceased using Growl a few months ago. I was using Mail.appetizer for my Mail notifications and there wasn’t any reason I had to keep using Growl. Then an e-mail from my hero and yours contacted me about his new application, Howl, which pushes Growl notifications to your iPhone as Push notifications. Now this wasn’t the first app in the App Store that did this, Prowl was the first. And too be honest I had a hard time finding usefulness to this. I auto-checked my e-mail and when I got a new message I just went and saw what it was. My iPhone twitter app already had Push.

Mostly out of loyalty to my friend, I gave it a chance. And let me say, I am hooked. The app adds a new “style” to Growl that lets you forward the notifications to an existing style while also getting Push. Plus it allows you to only Push notifications after your computer has been idle (the best feature IMO) so that when you are at your computer your phone isn’t going wild. I love knowing what my e-mails are before I get them (usually). And now if it’s not something I want to read I don’t even go to my e-mail. I have changed the frequency of checking to an hour and have considered making it manual. I have switched to an iPhone Twitter client that doesn’t use Push so Howl helps there. And with the prototype Facebook Notifications app for Mac, I get push notifications for Facebook now too. The best use was when I was waiting for a package this week and I got updates from the Delivery Status widget right to my phone.

This whole concept is great. In theory though, when more apps start using push this could be obsolete. But because Growl is compatible with so many more apps, there will always be something that would make Howl worth having.