This should be a pretty straight forward ios binary.
You probably need the 5.1 sdk, but You can run the iOS simulator with this: /Applications/Xcode.app//Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/iPhone\ Simulator.app/Contents/MacOS/iPhone\ Simulator -SimulateApplication ./thereOnceWasA
The app will pop up and say: I can see clearly now the rain has gone
This probably means we need to hide the view controller thing that's showing it and there is something hidden behind. When you rotate left or right, you see some other display things behind it. In that search box, there is a _ preloaded in the field.
Changing the Device to iPad (Retina) with a Scale of 50% you can see other elements that have "t" "n" "4" "n" "3"
For every one of these elements in the ViewController.nib file, there is an \x08\x81 before each of them. So I wrote a python script that found these two bytes throughout the file and would print the character after it. This resulted in a list of characters and a bunch of other stuff. The list of the characters was _0mu34kfmnctr. t,n,4,n,3, and _ were all known, and are in this list, but the n doesn't show up twice. So if the element uses the same letter, it just only has one representation for it. Luckily, when I was explaining the progress I made to Jay, I said the title of the challenge "there once was a" and ryan jokingly said "man from nantucket." This sparked instantly that all the characters to make that following statement in l33t speak were in the list I had gathered.
The correct key was m4n_fr0m_n4ntuck3t.