2nd
Deprivation: Day Nine (and how Prowl works with Google Voice)
Configuration day.
My new iPhone came in the morning. Thanks, Mr. FedEx guy.
Then came all the usual unboxing, powering up, activation and initial syncing. All this went relatively smoothly, but it was clear that this sync was going to take a long, long while. I canceled the sync midway and just took the phone to work half-baked.
Many things worked really well. Other things, surprisingly, didn’t. I had to reassociate some of my email accounts, but not all of them. My Exchange configuration for work email simply wasn’t there at all, so I had to redo that from scratch.
We’ve previously discussed in this space my having been a Grand Central, and now Google Voice user, for about eighteen months now. Google Voice finally opened to the general public last week.
Like everyone else using this innovative platform, the lack of a fully-fledged Google Voice iPhone App has really cramped my style and adds complication to an already complicated mechanism, ultimately designed to make things easier. (Note to the peanut gallery, yes, I know all this and more can be mine with a jailbroken iPhone with these Apps purchased through Cydia. I know. I know.)
A key drawback of Google Voice without a dedicated iPhone App is notification. Specifically, if a Google Voice app existed, when you received a Google Voice-directed voicemail message or text (SMS), your iPhone would alert you through notifications that it came in. Absent this capability, the Google Voice service can be configured to send a traditional SMS to the phone. This is a good proxy, but tends to burn up SMS messages like wildfire.
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Note to readers: it’s about to get super-geeky here… You may want to pick up after the next break if you want to save yourself a minor headache. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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I’ve been impressed with the promise of Prowl, which bills itself as an iPhone Growl notification service. For those unfamiliar, Growl is the open source common system-wide notification service for Macs. On Windows machines, practically every application has its own distinct mechanism to alert users to things going on. On the Mac, developers don’t deal with this—they tell their programs to hand off an alert to Growl, which runs in the background as a common service, and Growl does the alerting in the form of an alert bubble on screen, audible chime or other scriptable behavior to tell you that, for example, your latest DropBox document completed syncing.
Prowl takes the Growl implementation one final mile by forwarding the Mac-based Growl notification and sending it via Apple’s iPhone push notification service to your iPhone. For most notifications, this requires you to keep a Mac always on to be a server of sorts, a sentinel to forward notifications. A special API is configurable in the form of an add-on service called VoiceGrowl (I know, these names are usefully ridiculous). VoiceGrowl integrates into Prowl such that a Mac need not be in the loop in order to get Google Voice notifications sent to an iPhone through the iPhone push notification service. A bit of digital trickery ties all this together courtesy of Google Voice forwarding a notification to GMail, which is looking for a filtered string identifying the SMS as from Google Voice and in turn forwarding that to the VoiceGrowl servers.
(Surely this space would be even more useful with a diagram explaining this Rube Goldberg concoction, but someone is going to pay me before I spend two hours with Visio or OmniGraffle working it up. It’s painful enough that actually got all this working in the first place, and am now writing about it. I’m just sayin’.)
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Note to readers: Stand down Geek Alert. Stand Down.
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When set up properly, it works like this: your Aunt Sally sends you an SMS to your Google Voice number. On your iPhone, you get a notification alert, and if you click the “View” button on the alert, the Google Voice web app spawns so you can see the message and reply as you normally would. The behavior is essentially identical to getting and replying to a regular text message, except you use the Google Voice webapp and service to send and receive instead of the iPhone’s native Messaging app and AT&T.
All this work to avoid giving AT&T an extra, audacious $5 or $10 a month for a higher text messaging limit. It should be stated for the record that given AT&T’s current text messaging rates (really I should only pick on AT&T here, it’s all the carriers, basically), platinum on the spot market is cheaper. Text messaging is like buying sugar. Twenty-five cents for a packet of sugar; Twenty-five cents for a pound of sugar; Twenty-five cents for a ton of sugar drop shipped to any location on planet Earth. The economics of marketing defy ordinary economies of distribution. But I digress.
The point.
The point is that after two years with my old iPhone 3G, I hadn’t appreciated just now much I customized its behavior. It was a bespoke implementation to be the best made-for-me Swiss Army tool possible.
Nine days without it made my life very different very quickly.
And configuring the 3G’s replacement may take a little fiddling… or maybe a lot.
