I love Growl . Odds are, if you're a Mac user, you do too. Or at least you've heard of it.

But did you realize that it can do really amazing things? All it needs it a few tweaks and an application or three.

One of the latest and awesomest things you can do is receive Growl notifications on your iPhone with Prowl ($3, app store ).

You'll need to install the Growl Plugin and then configure your system to send notifications from Growl to Prowl.

But just what sort of amazing notifications should you be sending?
What about Twitter notifications?

Go grab yourself a copy of Tweetie and sign in to your account. For reasons that escape me, the Growl notification preferences are sort of buried in Tweetie. To enable them, go to "Tweetie" -> "Preferences" -> "Accounts" -> Click your account name -> "Notification Options"

Check the bottom field marked "Growl Notification". You probably don't want to send every single tweet you receive to your iPhone though.

Go to "System Preferences" -> "Growl" -> "Applications" Choose Tweetie, the click "Configure". Change the notifications option to assign a priority of "High" to Direct Messages and Mentions (or as you prefer).

Back in the main Growl Preferences, go to Display options. Remember where you set up Prowl? Change Prowl to send notifications when Priority is at least High. I also chose to wait until the computer is idle for a period of time, since I don't need two notifications at once.

What about some other applications? While I have the excellent Delivery Status app for my phone, I really want to have push notifications. Guess what? They have a free Dashboard Widget that supports Growl.

Or (one of my favorites) HellaNZB:"http://www.hellanzb.com/ . In fact, that reminds me of another great Growl feature: Notifications don't have to be local. My home server runs HellaNZB, which can be configured to send Growl notifications to a remote machine. Back in your Growl preferences, you just need to enable listening for incoming notifications and allow remote application registration.

And then yes, you can push those updates out via Prowl too.

Remember though, it's a good idea to only send messages assigned a high priority, otherwise you are (probably) going to be swamped with mundane messages and IMs.

Oh yeah, IMs. Zachary West, author of Prowl, also happens to be an Adium developer.