Question

I would like to create a service that parses data from a feed and then sends notifications to subscribed units.

And I’m note sure how to approach this problem. Would be thankful for any advice.

Answer 1

If you’re going to be sending less than 1,000,000 push messages per month (greater than that amount you would have to pay), I’d look into UrbanAirship . They have something called a feed feature that does this:

Urban Airship has a feature where we
will monitor an RSS or Atom feed and
send a push notification when a new
entry is published. We allow you to
set up a template to extract items
from the feed to dynamically generate
push notifications with content from
the new entry. You can easily set this
up from the interface at
https://go.urbanairship.com/ , but
this API allows you to
programmatically create them.

So, that might work for you. Or, you can look into setting up your own server that runs a script, parsing your feeds. Then you can use Easy APNs to send the messages yourself. I’m using it and it works perfectly for my needs. For me the learning cure was steep because I’d never done anything besides Obj-C, but it ended up being quite easy to learn.