Growl is one of the most popular, and widely used, Mac OS X utilities for displaying system-wide notifications. Prowl will now transmit your computer’s Growl notifications to your iPhone or iPod touch.

The app takes advantage of the 3.0 software to send Push Notifications to you. Setting up the computer-to-iPhone connection is simple, you simply sign up for an online Prowl account. Then, you download ‘Prowl’ as a theme for Growl, and all notifications will be ‘pushed’ to the iPhone.

The entire system is flawless, and having Growl notifications sent to the iPhone is a genius way of getting updates. The app works fine, and the only issue I’ve found is the inability to have notifications simultaneously displayed on the computer and on the iPhone.

While Prowl isn’t free, it’s worth it for any avid Growl user and isn’t terribly expensive at $2.99. See more by visiting Prowl in the app store.

The Sims, a popular video-game franchise from EA, has been ported to the iPhone as a life simulation game.

As many fans know, The Sims allows users to create people, design their homes, and control their lives. The iPhone version allows for many of the same features, but is heavily centered around the ‘life control’ aspect of the game.

For users that are interested in building and designing homes on-the-go, The Sims 3 for iPhone won’t fill your desires. There are minor moving, rotating, and purchasing methods for furniture, but these tools can’t compare to the features of the desktop version.

While controlling your Sims’ life, you’ll need to keep them satisfied and fill their wishes. Satisfaction levels include ‘Hunger’, ‘Energy’, ‘Bladder’, ‘Hygiene’, ‘Social’, and ‘Fun’. There are up to 73 goals and wishes that your Sim could come across for you to complete.

Within the game there are mini-challenges that improve a Sims’ skill set, which include ‘Cooking’, ‘Fishing’, ‘Repairing’, and ‘Gardening’. Of course, relationships are also a huge part of the game, in which you can befriend, anger, date, or marry the other Sims.

The Sims 3 is an extremely addicting game, that has engrossed me for many hours. There are numerous features and aspects to the game, some of which were mentioned here, that make it worth the expensive price tag.

See more about the Sims 3 for iPhone.

Analog recipe managers aren’t fun to use, or easy for that matter. One of the new digital recipe managers for the mac is SousChef from Acacia Tree Software.

At its simplest, SousChef allows you to import and create recipes. Recipes can have pictures, ingredients, directions, notes, and other information assigned to them. Each recipe can then be printed, blogged, or emailed.

SousChef can also store Grocery lists, that can either be printed or emailed. There’s even a full-screen cooking mode that includes support for control via an Apple remote and voiceover reading. Recipe search can be done with any number of factors, including name, ingredients, category, and cuisine. These factors can be combined and modified to any degree.

One feature that is unique to SousChef is a vast online database of recipes that, at the time of writing, has totaled over 103,000 recipes. The cloud database is accessible by the in-app search. SousChef will also keep track of recently imported and recently cooked recipes.

For the most part, SousChef is an excellent recipe manager and stacks up nicely against the other competition. It offers great features and has a supreme ease-of-use. SousChef costs $30, and can be downloaded for a free trial from Acacia Tree Software.

Blogging, as most people know, is typically done by writing posts in an online client. Yet, if you find yourself blogging a lot, and to different blogs, using the web interfaces can become tedious and even annoying. Luckily, MarsEdit is here to improve that experience as a desktop client.

The main window in MarsEdit is set up to display blogs on the left, with a list of posts on the right and previews of the selected posts below the list. Above all of that is the toolbar, which holds many basic functions. There’s nothing slick and flashy about MarsEdit, but it is functional and gets the job done.

Creating or editing a blog post opens up the blog editor and preview window. The editor is based around a large coding window. Of course, no coding knowledge is necessary to add text to the post, but the editor does support HTML and is not rich-text based. The editor window also has options for choosing categories, editing server options, adding media, and even some service-specific functions (such as choosing a post type in Tumblr).

There are many other powerful features to MarsEdit that aren’t located in the editor, such as the ability to schedule and edit posting dates, edit trackbacks, adding tags, and adding technorati tags. Unfortunately, some of these functions are hidden, or buried away, instead of being placed in the prominent editor window.

MarsEdit is also extremely powerful, with the ability to add and store local drafts, adding custom preview templates, support and ability to add macros, ability to upload photos to google, options regarding sending new posts, and sending pings. Each blog that you register can also have specific settings that pertain only to that blog. There are numerous blogging services supported, including but not limited to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Typepad.

While there are other blog editors that are a bit flashier and do certain tasks well, none excel like MarsEdit does. It’s easy to use, simple to figure out, and powerful in more ways than one. Plus, their service is excellent.

From Red Sweater Software, MarsEdit 2 costs $29.95 and is available for a free 30-day trial.

RSS Readers are used to retrieve articles, or posts, from frequently visited sites using an RSS feed. This typically includes online newspapers and blogs. Yet, most RSS Readers are boring. That’s where Times comes in, designed to bring the newspaper experience to the desktop.

Times is heavily graphics-based, with a design that mimics a physical newspaper. Instead of arranging feeds in a folder hierarchy, Times allows you to drag and drop them into a unique arrangement. Feeds are organized by giving them a specific place on the “newspaper”, and can be categorized into various “pages”, or sections.

Instead of the default, one-liner displayed in most other feed readers, Times will retrieve the text of an article and display it after clicking the headline. Times also uses many page curls and slides as transitions to boost the experience.

Other features include the ability to share articles to Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Twitter, and any website of your choosing. There’s also a “shelf” for storing articles that you wish to view later. The shelf even supports ‘stacks’ for grouping posts together.

In many ways, Times is a fresh way of using a feed reader. In many ways, Times is the RSS reader that Apple would have concocted themselves. However, power users might find that all the flashy features obtrude on getting to the content quickly. It would have been nice if there was an included “list view”, that was reminiscent of NetNewsWire so that users could flip back and forth between views.

At $30 for a single-user license, Times isn’t terribly cheap, yet it is worth it for users wanting a simplified and beautiful RSS-reading experience. There’s also a free trial available for download from Acrylic.