Earth Addresser 2¶
360 words on earthlingsoft
When I first came up with Earth Addresser a long time ago, it kept nagging me that it only wrote addresses to the KML file rather than the coordinates associated to those addresses. A consequence of that shortcoming was that every single time you opened the Earth Addresser created KML file in Google Earth, each address had to be looked up again by the application. Which seemed like a waste of Google’s resources - for all the duplicate lookups - as well as overly keen on sending addresses around.
It turned out that doing the relevant lookups through Google’s Maps API isn’t too hard, and I eventually even got my act together to give that a little testing, revamp the user interface, get to know about a few cool use cases for the application and add an ugly icon. And thus, today, I present the ‘all new’ Earth Addresser 2 which will send your addresses around the internet - without name or other information attached to them - and create a KML file for them to use in Google Earth. A nice toy.
Next up, I’d like Cocoa minded people to discuss whether or not Apple’s Address Book framework is somewhat half-assed in the way it handles country information. For automated lookups having country codes is extremely helpful as they avoid problems with the many ways you can write a country’s name (just think about the many ways one could designate the country information for someone living in London: England? U.K.? GB? Great Britain? United Kingdom? Vereinigtes Königreich? Großbritannien? Großbritannien und Nordirland (UK)? … and that’s just the start of it).
Apple’s current Address Book framework does provide a ‘country code’ which works reasonably well. Unfortunately said country code is only exposed via the slightly obscure address format setting in the Address Book and - even worse - the list of countries supported by the framework is extremely incomplete. If you know people in poor countries, you lose. So there’s more room for improvement in this. Perhaps I’ll get to that at a later stage, perhaps I’ll just try to sit it out and hope that Apple improve their Address Book framework (haha!).
