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!

i ponied up cash for the Apple Developer License a while back. and lo & behold, developers can download the DMG for the 3.0 Beta firmware update from the iPhone Dev Center! so i went and installed iPhone OS 3.0 Beta tonight … i wanted to check out the cut’n'paste capabilities, etc. downloaded and extracted the firmware update package, started iTunes, held down [Ctrl+Option] when clicking ‘Check for Update’ to bring up the file selector dialog, and installed the 3.0 Beta IPSW

great! hooray! it’s the usual slow process. however, once the device restarts, it goes into pre-activation mode … and iTunes rejects it as not behing a registered development device. open up the Device Management Portal, and it tells you how about Locating a Unique Device ID … “The 40 hex character string in the Identifier field is your device’s UDID.” i believe they refer to it as an ICCID in other places

alright, where can one find this magical string? well, it’s shown when your device is connected to iTunes … but of course, that’s the problem! it already won’t accept my device = meta-problem. so, then i read further … “Please DO NOT install the iPhone OS before registering device UDIDs, as installation on non-registered devices will render them inoperable.”

so i figured that i’m toast. i can easily find the Serial Number and IMEI, but not the UDID, at least according to Apple’s instructions

making a long story short … look at System Profiler (if you haven’t already) … under USB :: USB High Speed Bus :: iPhone :: Serial Number. register that as a developer device, and you’re good to go as soon as you re-boot the phone & iTunes. there’s a much more elaborate description of the process using Xcode, but it doesn’t seem to be mandatory cause i sure ain’t done that

and yes … cut’n'paste is really nice!