Receive Windows balloon notifications on your iOS device

The windows notifications that pop up usually in the lower right corner of your computer screen just above the toolbar can be very useful. They can alert you when your notebook battery is running out of juice and you need to find an outlet quickly to recharge it. It can tell you for instance that the video you are currently converting to another format is now finished, or it can tell you that your download is complete among other things.

This is all quite useful when you are on front of your PC but what if you're in the kitchen and your PC is in the bedroom but you still want to know when an encoding or download is finished or if there are any other alerts. For that very purpose you can use a versatile tool called Growl that 'will let you know when things happen' on your computer such as a new email arrived, or a friend is online. And what interests us is that it has the ability to forward all notifications or only  the ones you choose to you iOS device.

But before you can start to receive notifications on your iPhone, several components need to be installed and configured. First you'll need Growl for Windows. After downloading and installing the software, you'll need to install notification apps, which are sort of plugins for Growl, that will allow it to receive notifications from the appropriate programs. For your iOS device you can use Prowl, which is a Growl client for iOS.

If you choose the "Windows Balloons" plugin for Growl (you can install as many as you want), you can set it to forward all notifications to your iPhone by clicking the + button under 'Network' in the main Growl Windows (you may have to double-click the Growl icon in the toolbar in case it's not open yet) and select 'click here to forward notifications to an iPhone via Prowl'. After going through a short verification process, your iPhone will receive all future notifications when it's on the same network as the PC.