Earth Addresser¶
359 words on earthlingsoft
All right, here comes another little piece of playful software. Recently I received an e-mail as following up on my post on Geotagging on whether I knew whether it’s possible to put photos from the Address Book on the map in Google Maps. – I didn’t. But after pondering the question a little, I figured it should be easy to get the addresses into Google Earth by writing them into a KML file and opening that.
And after that both Nat, who got this rolling, and myself started hacking up a little tool to do this. Nat using AppleScript, myself by adapting what I had done for Mailboxer before. And while these things never work quite as easily as they look at first (getting into NSXML seemed like a typing intensive but worthwhile detour and some aspects of Google Earth’s icon loading remain a bit unclear to me), working results appeared quite quickly. My side of which I present here:
Earth Addresser. It takes the addresses from your Address Book, writes them to a KML file with links to any photos you may have for your contacts. And opening that file displays the addresses right in Google Earth. Neat. And, if it weren’t for the slightly uncomfortable fact that Google Earth and Google will know about all addresses you use this on after this, excellent.
There are still some potential problems like that of addresses potentially not being found because of strangely formatted addresses or things like department names being in the address. Or because people have set the wrong country for an address’ format. But for my well-organised address book it does work reasonably well. And seeing my friends right there on the map is just nice.
While doing this, I thought that this tool is definitely offers one of the nicest pay-offs for a well organised and -filled address book. One that makes the time wasted entering those addresses and adding those photos worth it. I also started to think that the Address Book framework, while doing the job, could possibly be a bit better.
.png)
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
