I stumbled upon Prowl this week and I have to say it's a pretty brilliant idea and an excellent use of the new push notification system in iPhone 3.0. Since they have an open API to send whatever you want to a user (defined by their API key), I decided to create an extension based on IPS to send whatever text you select to your iPhone. This could be phone numbers, directions, recipes...whatever you want to quickly send. It functions like a copy and paste across devices, similar to what Evernote's Web Clipper does but with the added bonus of having whatever you sent pushed as a push notification.

Download Prowler 1.0

Usage:
This assumes that you have the Prowl account and have the plugin and iPhone app installed. If you don't, get up to speed here.

1) Generate an API key under 'settings'.
2) Install the Prowler extension and restart Firefox when prompted
3) Copy and paste the API key you just generated into the Prowler Options preferences (under Tools > Prowler Options) and close the dialog
4) To send text to Prowl, select any text (up to 10000 characters), right click and click "Send Selected Text to Prowl"

That's all! Let me know how it works for you guys.

7 Responses to “Prowler: A Firefox extension to quickly send selected text to Prowl”

  1. How to send text from any application to Prowl | JZ * LABS - the web experiment playground of jason ting Says:

    [...] post is a follow-up to Prowler, my Firefox extension that lets you send selected text to [...]

  2. Roy Bragg Says:

    This works like a charm. Great work.

  3. J Hatchett Says:

    Thank you it works perfect inside the Vista64 and Win732 environments being sent to iPhone3gs through Growl for Windows.

    PS If you need a CDN (Content Delivery Network … just in case) check out my employer, we do have a Solar powered office, though as you probably know we can’t say the same for the Data Centers … Yet

    Thanks
    Jason

  4. craym0nk Says:

    Brilliant work! Is there any chance this could be extended to allow some kind of text input and editing rather than just sending highlighted text?

    Something along the lines of a status bar icon that popped up a blank input box with further icons that would automagically paste the current URL or highlighted text into the input area and then allow the user to edit the content before sending. Checkout the interface for TwitterFox if my description doesn’t make sense.

  5. DeeJayBee Says:

    Bloody good work! I use this all the time to send info on pages I’m interested in to the missus; she enjoys getting bombarded, really!

  6. Prowler 1.0.1 | JZ * LABS - the web experiment playground of jason ting Says:

    [...] View the original Prowler post [...]

  7. How to Jailbreak an iPhone (as of OS 3.1.2) (also works for iPod Touch) | i am words Says:

    [...] updates on most everything on your iPhone. Fun stuff. (If you use Firefox, you’ll also enjoy Prowler, which lets you send text directly to your phone from your [...]

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