When Erica Sadun of The Unofficial Apple Weblog contacted us a couple of weeks ago because she wanted to write about RF.com, we were quite honored.

From the moment Eric Chamberlain and I got our hands on the initial production models of the iPhone and we got to working on RF.com, we’d been following Sadun’s TUAW columns on the iPhone closely. As seen from our perch, Sadun had as much to do with Apple’s decision to open up the iPhone to outside developers as anyone; her useful native applets that worked only on jail-broken iPhones must’ve certainly opened some eyes and minds in Cupertino — as it did ours.

These days, we’re busy testing iPhone 2.0, which prevents us from jailbreaking our phonesand running Sadun’s apps. Particularly missed is her simple but effective voice recorder application, which allows recording and keeping audio “notes” on the iPhone when writing is inconvenient (like when stuck for hours in Bay Area traffic or pushing a three-year-old on the park swing). Hopefully, when iPhone firmware 2.0 is released, we’ll be able to easily install Sadun’s little gems right from the Iphone App Store.

While working on her TUAW column, Sadun ran into problems with RF.com’s registration system. Over the past couple of months, the focus of our development attention has been on the feature set the RF dialer offers: Skype calling, GoogleTalk calling, SIP URI dialing, compatibility with Asterisk and other office PBX systems. We knew there were circumstances where registering with the RF.com server was dicey, but we chose to address those later.

Sadun wrote about RF.com, and she was quite nice — nicer than she might have been, anyway. She talked positively about what RF.com offers, and made it clear that, as a Beta program, there are still issues pending. She could have rightfully criticized us for the finicky, overly intrusive, registration system, but chose not to.

Still, Sadun’s registration experience, which she described to us when we spoke, got us to revamp the registration system from the ground up. And now, we think, we got it right.

The problem had been that the registration process relied too much on ever-changing database records, session variables, constant page loads and back-and-forth communications between the iPhone and our server. Unlike the RF Dialer itself, a self-contained “Web 2.0″ application that runs relatively glitch-free, the RF.com registration process was decidedly a “Web 1.0″ offering. We thought we made it simple. And simple it was — as long as everything went right.

But if any small went astray (say, a blip in network connectivity) or the user would do something perfectly normal but unforeseen by us (like pressing the back button at a specific point in the process), registration would fail. Worse, in a few circumstances, registrations lived in a partially finished state in our database, requiring manual record-level intervention so the iPhone user could try again.

Now the whole process has been significantly trimmed down, and relies much less on constant back-and-forth data communication between you iPhone and our servers.

The whole registration process now consists of three short text entry fields, a four-digit keypad entry, two simple pull-down menus, six button/text clicks, and only a single communication between iPhone and RF.com server. On a typical Edge network connection, registration should take about 60 seconds (less for those with nimbler thumbs). We think we’ve captured all potential hick-ups, and now present relatively seamless recovery when the unforeseen gets in the way.

Now we can’t wait for Erica Sadun — and anyone else who tried to register with RF.com and gave up in exasperation — to try again. And if you do find something we may have overlooked, let us know. This time we’ll fix it fast.

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.

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.