While we made RingFree a web application that doesn’t need any hacks to run on the iPhone, there are still certain things you’ll want to make sure are operational before registering with RF.

Some folks are still reporting problems when registering.We’re quite certain, though, that checking the list below and correctly pre-configuring your iPhone will make the registration painless.

Make sure your iPhone is not in “Airplane Mode” - Click on “Settings” and set “Airplane Mode” to “OFF”;

If you intend to use a Wi-Fi data connection, make sure WiFi is on - In order to work (both when registering and dialing), your iPhone will need to make a data connection to the RingFree servers. Wi-Fi, though not always available, of course, is your best choice. Click on “Settings” and look to the right of the Wi-Fi  icon. If a Wi-Fi network is listed, you’re all set. Otherwise, click on the Wi-Fi icon, then make sure Wi-Fi is on (it should say so at the top). Click on the “OFF” button to turn Wi-Fi on, then select a network (if one is available) from the list that appears on the iPhone. When connected via Wi-Fi, you’ll see a striped upside-down triangle to the right of your service provider’s name on the upper-left corner of the iPhone. If there is no network available, you’ll have to use the EDGE network.

If there is no Wi-Fi where you are, make sure EDGE is on -   Whether the EDGE data network is available to you is more dependent on your mobile network provider than anything (though EDGE will be forced off if you are in the “Airplane Mode” described above). Look on the upper left of your iPhone, if you are not on Wi-Fi, you should see a capital “E” to the right of your service provider’s name on the upper-left corner of you iPhone. If, instead you see an upside down striped triangle, you’re using Wi-Fi (this should work). If you don’t seen either a triangle or a capital “E”, then you have no data connection and won’t be able to proceed. If this is the case, find a Wi-Fi network to latch onto, or take your iPhone to a location where the EDGE network is available.

Make sure you have a cellular signal -  Both to register and use RingFree, you’ll be making a regular mobile phone call. This means you’ll need a cell signal. On the upper left hand corner of the iPhone you should see an upwards and rightwards sloping set of bars. If you don’t see this, you’ll need to get to a location with a cell signal.

Make sure Caller-ID is set to “ON” - We use the caller-ID information sent by your iPhone to validate your account and make sure the telephone is authorized to use your account.  This means caller-ID must be set to “ON” to register and use RingFree. To make sure, go to “Settings”, click “Phone”, In the “Calls” section, click “Call Waiting”, and make sure it is set to “ON”.

Make sure Mobile Safari has JavaScript enabled - RingFree uses JavaScript extensively both in registration and in the dialer. If JavaScript is disabled, registration will ail. Go to “Settings”, click “Safari”, and, in the “Security” section, set “JavaScript” to “ON”.

Make sure Mobile Safari is set to “Accept Cookies” -  For RingFree to work, you must allow cookies to be placed on your telephone so that the server can track current session information. Go to “Settings” and click “Safari”. Set “Accept Cookies” to either “From Visited” or “Always” (for security purposes, we recommend the “From Visited” setting).

If you tried to register with RingFree and the process did not complete, you may try again after checking all of the above.

We’ve been big fans of Televolution’s PhoneGnome for quite a long time now. It’s an affordable and easy to use VoIP product/service that packs a wallop when it comes to functionality.

When we started working on RingFree, we knew we wanted the first release of our product to work with PhoneGnome. So we contacted David Beckemeyer, told him of our plans, and he opened up development hooks into PhoneGnome that allowed us to seamlessly integrate the two.

We were, understandably, quite happy with the result. And so was David, who asked to license the RingFree interface for use with PhoneGnome.

The result is that RingFree’s initial release supports PhoneGnome right off the bat; and now PhoneGnome is using our interface to provide the iPhone service directly.

If you’re a PhoneGnome user and want to use the service on the iPhone, you now have two choices: use RingFree’s web app at https://rf.com, or use PhoneGnome’s web app at http://m.phonegnome.com/iphone. The two look a bit different, but when using PhoneGnome, the functionalities are identical.

Expect similar licensing arrangements with other great VoIP services in the near future.

Before RingFree escaped out into the wild a couple of weeks back, we had been going back and forth about how much to charge.

That we need to generate revenues for RF to survive goes without saying. Hardware and bandwidth costs alone are large and continue to grow as we continue to gain new users. To expand to countries outside the US, initially the European countries where the iPhone has been released, and, soon after, others, will make those costs’ skyward climb more pronounced.

When we started to talk amongst ourselves about  the need for revenues, most of us, accustomed to the trialware method of software distribution of many of our favorite computer programs, had settled on the same idea for RingFree.

So, as was reported by various bloggers, RingFree would be available to users free of charge for 30 days, and $30 a year after.

But then something interesting happened. As more and more of you began using RingFree  to make calls on your iPhone that could not be made on any other platform — to Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger users, for example — we realized we had something much more powerful in RingFree than a $30 program dial out program.

With RingFree, we could help build a communications bridge connecting users of mobile, traditional telephone, and internet calling networks around the world.

And, the best way to build that network is to offer it at no cost its users.

As a web app, RingFree is free and will be free.

We’ll be publicly talking about our plans to generate revenues in these pages shortly (yes, our friend Dameon is on the right track).

But you can now feel free to use RingFree and install your services on it today, and you won’t be asked to pay for it tomorrow.

We’ve made a lot of changes to the RF dialer over the past 10 days, and have put them into the production version, now at 0.2.0.

We’ve added Recent call and Favorites list “Click-to-Call” functionality, revised and beefed up the dialer pulldown menus, fixed some tricky URL encoding problems when making calls, and tightened up the registration process to reduce the number of time-out related issues you have reported.

Try things out and let us know what you think at http://forum.rf.com.

Following is a complete list of changes:

Favorites/Recents

• Click-to-Call dialing from the Favorites menu is now enabled;
• Click-to-Call recent calls is now enabled. A user can now click on the body of a recent call listing to immediately place a call to the recent destination using the service/pbx previously used;
• A user can now click on a “star” icon to the right of a recent call listing to add that destination and calling service to the user’s list of favorites. The user will be asked to provide a name to appear in the Favorites menu for the added listing;
• A user can now manually  enter a listing into the Favorites menu. User must input a name (as it will appear on the menu), a destination number or IP calling address, and the calling service to be used;
• If an Internet call was placed with the cellular carrier (i.e.: AT&T) selected in the calling services pulldown, it would be saved in recent calls as having been made by the cellular provider, and not via the Internet. This has been fixed;
• Recent calls now show the favorite name if the call destination is included in the Favorites list.

Main Dialer Service Pulldown Menu

• The service pulldown menu on the main dialer has been reorganized into two sections: Calling services/carriers/PBXes listed on top, and some popular Internet and IP calling destinations listed on the bottom;
• When choosing Google Talk, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger form the calling services pulldown menu, the destination call does not need a suffix. Thus, when calling “MyPal@gmail.com”, if “Google Talk” is selected in the pull down menu, only “MyPal” needs to be entered in order to dial;
• There is a new item in the calling services pulldown menu called “Internet”. When selected, an attempt will be made to route any call placed through the RF server, with no need to use a third party calling server or PBX. If such a call cannot be routed through the RF server (i.e.: a call to a PSTN telephone number, or a call to a non-supported service) the call will fail. SIP URI calls, FWD calls, and calls to supported Voice over IM services (Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, etc.) will route directly over the RF server;
• A bug that allowed a user to set the default Call Settings to blank, generating a dial error, has been squashed.

Dialer

• A call to a telephone number prefixed with a plus (”+”) sign would not complete. This has been fixed. All dial strings are now URL encoded to avoid such errors;
• The RF POP number that appeared when making a call through the RF dialer did not include a plus (”+”) sign or country code, making it impossible for non-US users to even try ringFree while it is limited to US POPS. This has been fixed.

Registration

• Entering a back key, manually changing the URL, and other activities during the registration process on the iPhone was breaking the registration so that an account was only partially created. We’ve added catches for these conditions;
• If iPhone caller ID information was spoofed, a caller could have used the phone activation process to impersonate a user account. Re-activating an existing user account now prompts for a login after the phone activation process completes. To keep the database size down, Activation Codes are now deleted from the database immediately after the user account is matched to the caller ID.

Most of you probably know, and those of you who don’t can easily find out, that RingFree is currently being offered as trial ware: You get to try it out for 30 days, and if you would like to continue, we ask that you pay $30 per year.

Now, none of you have been charged because we haven’t even entered the trial stage. In other words, the 30-day trial has not yet kicked off for those of you have signed up with us, and we haven’t even presented a payment method on our pages.

But over the past week or so that we’ve been in live beta, we’ve gathered enough information to make it possible for us to have a pricing policy that reflects our operational expenses and other potential revenue sources.

That means our pricing will change. Come back and read about it here on Monday, January 28. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised . . . very pleasantly.

When RingFree’s Eric Chamberlain sent the rest of the team his OmniGraffle flow charts describing an on-iPhone registration process for RF that was simple and required a minimum of user keyboard input, we were mostly hooked. Some of us, though, were skeptical: Could the iPhone handle it?

The answer so far has been mostly “Yes”.

Most of you have been able to register with RingFree and able to make phone calls in less than minute. And you’ve told us you really like the process for its simplicity (you also told us we need to shorten some of the explanatory text because you’re not in in the fifth grade — and we will).

But some of you ran into problems. Somewhere in the middle of the process — usually right after phone activation — the registration abruptly ended, and you were left in RingFree limbo: partially registered with no where to go.

When we did come across a solution, we slapped our foreheads because it took so long to figure out the obvious: Those registering with us over WiFi had few problems. But those of you trying to sign-up over AT&T’s EDGE network ran into time-outs and blue-box warnings that killed the process.

The issue is that the iPhone is not able to maintain both a data connection over EDGE and a call connection over GSM concurrently (WiFi and GSM concurrently are OK). So, when you went into the  activation phone call to enter your 4-digit key, you lost data connection with our server and the process would time out. The result: Your iPhone would be activated but you were never registered.

We thought — fingers crossed — we got a handle on the problem. And we deployed javascript modifications that accommodate the momentary loss of data connectivity using EDGE.  Still, some of you, as of early this morning, can’t fully register.

We finally realized that enough of you have been accessing our servers using EDGE that AT&T is caching our data. And until those caches clear and AT&T has our latest javascript in its memory banks,  there’s not much we can do except to ask you who are still facing registration problems to either wait a bit, or to head on down to your local espresso parlor with WiFi and sing up with us there. You’ll be up an running in no time.

P.S.: Using EDGE to make calls through RingFree does not face the same kinds of issues.

The team behind RingFree joked over sandwiches yesterday that the company’s entire marketing budget had been spent on parking near San Francisco’s Moscone Convention center, where the Macworld  Conference and Expo was held earlier this month.

And, though parking in downtown San Francisco is outrageously expensive, it was worth it. We showed off RingFree to a few people. One of those, Ben Wilson of cNet’s  iPhoneAtlas blog, wrote about us and a few other bloggers followed.

Now several hundred of you are using RingFree — stress-testing it, if you will — and we’re learning a lot from your usage patterns, feedback and our fattening log files.

Yesterday was the first time we were able to carve out a few moments to get together face-to-face since Ben’s RingFree “discovery”. We celebrated our initial success for a few minutes. Then we got right back to work.

Yes, too much to do now. We still have to fix the registration process (works fine with WiFi, less fine with Edge and AT&T’s aggressive data caches); and there are many features — and some big changes — to come.

We welcome your comments on this blog, but please, take questions, support requests and feature suggestions to the forum where they are better suited. But do come back to this blog often as this is where we’ll do our best to keep you apprised of the goings-on, the what’s-ups and the why’s-thats.