It was the very first civic hackathon at Pasadena, and they wanted to innovate means to utilize technology in society. The city has a profound and fantastic API anyone can readily use to make some awesome apps (http://data.cityofpasadena.net/home/).
So for the event, I entered with the goal to utilize and practice APNS, since I had not previously. I'm not going to lie: APNS is like faith, and you don't know what's going on. Unlike faith, there are some more down to earth metrics that make APNS concrete, although, it may not seem that way from the beginning. At the heart of APNS is SSL, and at the heart of SSL are certificates.
The trick is this, now listen carefully, the settings on the provisioning profile must match the application exactly, and they are both critical to setting up the environment for APNS.
I utilized a nice piece of code written for Node.js (http://orderoo.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/apple-push-notifications-on-heroku-using-node-js-8/), and refactored it a bit.
The product was successful, and at the end, #hackforpasadena was a great event. If ever there's a trivia question "who was the second human in the history of Pasadena civic hackathons to present a project?" the answer is me 8]
UPDATE: The city of Pasadena hooked up participants with a consultant and provided the chance to further the development of products developed at their hackathon. Kudos to the city of Pasadena for supporting the efforts.
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