Push Notifications area an important new feature in the new iPhone 3.0, and one that will be naturally useful for most people using RemObjects SDK to build iPhone apps because – by definition – if you’re using RO, you have a server that your iPhone app talks to, and the potential to have things happening on said server that warrant notification.
As of today, we have published a new, small open source project that sits on top of RemObjects SDK for .NET and RemObjects SDK for OS X to make it really easy to add push notification support to your apps. And i mean, really easy.
Available on code.remobjects.com as part of the iPhone Goodies repository, RemObjects.SDK.ApplePushProvider takes care of the entire package of handling Push notifications: Getting your devices registered with the server (and maintaining and persisting said registration over time) and sending out the actual notifications. All that’s left for you to do, really, is to come up with things to notify your about!
I’ve written up an extensive overview of how it all works on our wiki.
As mentioned above, the provider is implemented using RemObjects SDK for .NET, but for those of you using RO/Delphi, it will also provide a good conceptual starting point for implementing the same in Delphi (and who knows, maybe you can contribute it back to the repository). Even if you;re not using RemObjects SDK at all, it should still be a good reference implementation.
I hope you’ll find this useful, and – as always – feedback (and contribution!) would be greatly appreciated.
yours,
marc hoffman
Just saw this article on Ars Technica. Interestingly it looks like Apple kills push notifications for unlocked phones. Not sure how many people that affects really, but something to be aware of writing apps that use it I suppose.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/apple-may-be-blocking-push-notifications-for-unlocked-iphones.ars
As for me, still hoping I can afford an iPhone someday. :-(
actually, i was not surprised to read that article at all. i think this is less a question of Apple explicitly disabling Push for unlocked iPhones, as it is a matter of Push needing explicit support from the phone provider (not unlike, say, Visual Voice Mail), to work.
If you think about it, you phone can’t actually keep a TCP connection open to Apple’s server 24/7. It can’t even be reachable via an open, listening TCP socket 24/7 – your battery would be dead in no time. I’m guessing something special is happening between Apple’s push server and the cell network to “activate” a phone that’s on the cell network, but not connected to the data network, if it needs to deliver a push.
of course that’s just me, guessing.