Curious Squid

A: Pingle keeps most of its settings in the iPhone Settings.app. Launch it, then scroll down until you see the Pingle icon. Tap that.

You’re going to be referred to Pingle settings a lot, so you should probably read this answer a couple of times before proceeding. Also see this blog post about the Settings app.

A: I am personally a satisfied user, and my company has developed an iPhone application that uses the Ping.FM service. We’ve also got a Mac OS X Dashboard widget if that tickles your fancy. But there is no direct affiliation.

A: Most likely, you have set your image quality settings too high.

If you have all the image quality settings maxed out, it may take *minutes* to upload your photo.

Note that in version 1.05, Pingle had some bugs in image quality settings. So when you’re using 1.1, you should definitely review your settings. You will generally get both faster and higher quality uploads with 1.1 than you did with 1.05.

I recommend 1024×768, and around 40% quality unless you’re always posting from a WiFi network. These are now the default settings for Pingle.

In version 1.1, I have changed the posting screen to show both the resulting image file size and a very rough estimate of upload time based upon your current connection type. And while posting, there is now a progress bar. So at least you can tell whether it’s working.

A: Don’t get too hung up on the numbers. Think of it as “inefficiency” rather than “quality”. In other words, I’m recommending you post your images with only 40% inefficiency. I’m a glass half-full kind of guy.

If you don’t mind waiting minutes for a post to upload, feel free to crank everything up to the maximum. But there’s nothing I can do about the speed of your network, so please don’t file a complaint about slow uploads.

Here’s a compromise you might try instead. Use the recommended settings for posting your photos to social networks, but tell Pingle to save your photos to the iPhone’s built in photo album. It will do this at full quality, and you can later retrieve the photos from the iPhone in the usual way, email them, post them with some other program, etc.

A: Yes! Look in the Pingle Settings area for an option called “Save Photos to Album”. Enable it. Photos you take with the camera from inside Pingle will be saved to the iPhone’s photo album at full quality and resolution.

A: It’s possible that some data has gotten corrupted. You can use the Advanced (or Maintenance) section of Pingle’s preferences to reset some of its data files. See pic.

If that doesn’t work, try uninstalling and reinstalling the application. You won’t be charged again for doing so. This will reset

Note that if you’re running a jailbroken iPhone, you’re more likely to experience instability. So Don’t Do That.

A: Yes!

There is no explicit title field, but you can certainly use one.

If you’re using a “blog” style posting method, you’ll notice that the keyboard now has a Return key, and the character count is no longer counting down from 140, but just showing you the total post size.

If you use the Return key in this mode, it will insert a newline. And if Pingle notices that a blog-style post has more than one line, it will use the first line as the title.

A: That’s something that the Ping.FM service controls. While we love and use the Ping.FM service, that’s a separate company. So far they seem to prefer the link-at-start method.

Changing it would require basically abandoning all of the photo-handling functions of Ping.FM and using something like Twitpic instead.

A: The short answer is that it’s more work for less gain. Ping.FM already handles

This is something we might address in a future version if demand is great enough.

A: There’s not much I can do about that. Try contacting @pingfm on Twitter, or using their GetSatisfaction.com site.

This is no different than the dozens of developers who created Twitter clients. Twitter is a third party service, and they have limited control over how Twitter performs.

A: I heard about this behavior in version 1.05 from a few people. Here’s how to confirm that it’s happening to you.

On your iPhone, open http://ping.fm/ in MobileSafari. Login and post a test update. If you can see that, and the post went through, then Ping.FM is probably fine and Pingle is confused.

First thing, please let me know about this by filing a bug.

A: The best thing right now is to post your problem at our GetSatisfaction site. This is the URL:

http://getsatisfaction.com/curioussquid/products/curioussquid_pingle

A: This is a bug in the Ping.FM service. You need to rename/recreate your trigger via the Ping.FM website to use only lowercase letters.

A: That’s all done through the Ping.FM website at http://ping.fm/. There is no API that Pingle can use to manipulate your posting settings. However, you can open the website inside MobileSafari and accomplish anything you need from there.

A: I’ve found the Ping.FM folks to be extremely receptive and responsive to feedback. You should contact them at @pingfm on Twitter or their GetSatisfaction customer support site:

http://getsatisfaction.com/pingfm/products/pingfm_pingfm

A: iPhone application developers and web-based social network developers have very different business models.

However, I am considering a feature-limited free version of Pingle.

A: Yep. I’ll go ahead and point you some of my “competitors”, but I think that most users will find Pingle the best and most powerful multi-social-network-posting application out there.

• the Ping.FM web site: this provides full access to Ping.FM triggers, but won’t let you upload photos or set your location or view your post history.
• Nambu: a free social networking client that also support posting to Ping.FM. However, it provides very little control over your posting settings — e.g., no triggers –and doesn’t feature the automatic location or photo posting features of Ping.FM supported by Pingle.
• Tweetie: my favorite Twitter client. Also not free. Tweetie allows you to configure a Ping.FM account to also receive postings when you post to Twitter. It doesn’t let you control which trigger you use, make blog posts, or provide some of the other Pingle features like automatic location fuzzing.

A: In Pingle’s settings, you have to primary controls you should be concerned about. The first is “Auto-attach Location”. Basically, this means that with every new post, Pingle will go ahead and attach a location to it without your having to push the cross-hairs button on the posting page.

“Location Privacy” is a tool to keep your stalkers at bay. What it does is randomly “fuzz” your reported location by some amount. It takes your position on the map and draws a circle with its center at that point. The circle’s radius is determined by your privacy setting, and may be anywhere from 100 meters to many kilometers. It then randomly picks a point within that circle and reports that as your location.

I recommend 500 meters for the normally paranoid. If you fuzz too much, you might as well not report location. It can get especially weird for those posting from coastal areas. A large enough fuzz will put you in the ocean occasionally.

A: Indeed it is. It’s basically just a thin wrapper around the web-based Google Maps service.

I’m not sure the map view is actually all that important to people. I could work on optimizing it, or just wait for iPhone OS 3.0 (due in June), which allows use of the iPhone’s builtin Google Maps client. That’s the best option.