iPhone push notifications not working in Rails app - apn_sender

Question

I've set up my rails app to send push notifications to my iphone app using this tutorial as my guide:

http://blog.thefrontiergroup.com.au/2011/05/sending-apple-push-notifications-in-rails-with-redis-and-apn_sender/

Everything seems to be running fine - but when I try to create a new notification in the console

APN.notify(my_token, :alert => "Test message", :badge => 4, :sound => true)

all it returns is an empty array! # => []

When I check for feedback

feedback = APN::Feedback.new

I get the message:

APN::Feedback: Connection not currently established to feedback.sandbox.push.apple.com on 2196

I'm connected to redis OK, it seems to be logging lots of data:

[13058] 08 Jun 16:42:03 - DB 0: 2 keys (0 volatile) in 4 slots HT.
[13058] 08 Jun 16:42:03 - 0 clients connected (0 slaves), 922944 bytes in use
[13058] 08 Jun 16:42:08 - DB 0: 2 keys (0 volatile) in 4 slots HT.

But (as far as I'm aware) I'm not connected to the apple server.

This is on my OSX 10.6 development environment. Ruby 1.9.2 Rails 3.1.0.rc1

Can anybody help me troubleshoot this?

What format should the iPhone notification token be in? Base64 decoded?

Answer 1

Managed to fix this one - the problem seemed to be with the token format I was using.

Changed to this format:

# (regexp)
/(\w{8}\s){7}(\w{8})/

# randomly generated example string
f4134ff5 ec6504c2 a803da24 fb79cbcd 5243b00d d7fa625f 54c6b4ea 05768cf4