Download Pintail

Pintail

Pintail is an application for Android phones. It was an experiment in "useful minimalism". It's now slightly less minimalist, but rather more useful.

Pintail helps you to locate your phone.
Use it to share your location with selected friends and family.
It's very simple to use!

Screenshots

Click on the images below for a full-sized view.

Download

Pintail is available from the Android Market

Note that at present Pintail uses an element of the Android APIs which is not documented and therefore not supported. Though it is possible that the functionality may change (requiring adjustments to Pintail), I consider it unlikely that the capability will be entirely dropped from the Android platform. Since Pintail strikes me as such a useful application, I have (uncharacteristically) decided to release it anyway, despite its use of an uncertain Android API.

Instructions

Just launch the application and enter a PIN number into the box, then when you need to find your phone, borrow someone else's and send yours an SMS which includes the text:

locate your-PIN
eg. locate 256

The phone will do its best to pinpoint its position before sending back an SMS message containing its location and a handy link to Google Maps.

If you want to, you can share the PIN number with others. They can use it to find out where you are when they message you, but please share it responsibly!.

You can even leave the PIN blank but this is potentially unsafe since anyone could request your location, but you'll always know they've requested it because you will be notified of the incoming SMS.

A user guide and complete documentation are available from within the application.