the hierarchy of preferences is somewhat distributed however …

• the Prowl site will explain all the installation stuff. the first level of preferences is configuring the Prowl plug-in to be your default Growl notification route. it’s good that the Mac plug-in allows you to choose a pass-through notification method so that you will still see the events locally
• then there’s the iPhone client preferences, under Settings. they explain in the FAQ that you need to change your settings, then start up the Prowl client to commit them to the server. confusing, because your changes don’t take effect until that commit, so it’s just a matter of knowing. also, the Settings only allow you to disable Sound while the app is running (which is a nice feature)
• it took me a further read to figure out that i needed to disable the background push Sound & Vibrate feature through the general Notification Settings. you can tweak the Prowl app so that it’s seen and not heard

i’m a big fan of TwitterFox because it’s equally simple & straightforward. i chose Scalaris as my Mac Twitter client of choice for the same reason — i don’t needs one of the feature-rich hefty ones

eventually i’ll be updating my AWS health checks to use the prowl Ruby gem. very thoughtful!

thanks to @laughingsquid for the tip on Prowl. i’m looking forward to a further geometrical increase in information overload!