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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!).
January 28, 2009, 1:28
Tagged as
Earth Addresser, earthlingsoft, v2.
I edited address data and redid “create placemarks”. Now I have duplicates of everything. I deleted the first “placemark creation” but it still shows duplicates.
August 26, 2010, 4:40
@Bruno:
That sounds odd. I can’t really tell what’s happening in your Google Earth, unfortunately.
All I can do is recommend to first remove all of your address placemarks to be sure they are really gone out of Google Earth and then import the file again.
August 26, 2010, 8:42
Hi - I changed all my failed addresses so the country is included - ‘United Kingdom’ - but Earth Addresser doesn’t seem to recognise that the addresses have changed. They still fail the lookup, and the listing of failed addresses still includes ‘us’ as the country. How can I reset Earth Addresser to start again from scratch?
Thanks
BA
August 26, 2010, 18:17
@Benet Allen:
Earth Addresser does not use the country name typed in but the country set in the menu for the address format information (cf Earth Addresser Help). Unfortunately Apple’s Address Book software does not automatically synchronise these two bits of information.
August 26, 2010, 20:28
Hi, thanks a lot for that nice tool!
Could you add a newline after each placemark in the KML file? Would be way easier to do some manual adjustments afterwards.
Thanks a lot
August 27, 2010, 22:36
Hi Christoph,
I am writing the KML file using Apple’s readymade XML library. Unfortunately I didn’t discover a way to pretty-print the output with that.
If you don’t mind using the Terminal, you may find that using the xmlllint command like this:
xmllint --format /path/to/Addresses.kml
will do the pretty-printing for you.
Just for curiosity’s sake: In which way do you edit the file? And, on a technical level, could those changes be achieved with XSLT?
August 28, 2010, 16:53
Where is the Earth Addresser’s Icon?
February 23, 2011, 11:48
Hello Sven,
I love Earth Addresser 2. It has allowed me to see where I miscategorized a persons home address as work address. Now I have made corrections in address book and would like to rerun the entire group. I have deleted the .kml file that was written to my desktop and cleared history directly from google earth. The message I get from Earth Addresser 2 is that “The selected addresses have already been looked up.” How do I rerun?
-Jeff
June 5, 2011, 15:43
Hi Jeff,
great that you enjoy Earth Addresser!
The application will automatically look up the new address once you changed it. Are you sure the updated address is looked up correctly?
You can use the command to show the addresses which failed to be looked up in the Special menu to check whether the new address is causing any problems.
If you want to start from scratch completely you’ll have to delete Earth Addresser’s preferences file (net.earthlingsoft.earthaddresser.plist) in the ~/Library/Preferences folder. However, I doubt this is really going to help.
June 6, 2011, 23:39
Hi!
Sounds exactly like the program I was looking for - unfortunately, its not working (any more): when I try to look up the addresses, the connection to the server cannot be established… )-:
Cheers
Oliver
August 23, 2012, 20:49
Thanks for your report, Oliver. I just tried my copy of the application and it worked as it used to, so it’s hard to judge what may be going wrong on your side. Any chance it could have just been a glitch in your internet connection? Can you open the address http://maps.google.com/maps/geo in your web browser?
August 23, 2012, 21:06
Hi again!
Thanks for your reply!
Yes, the address is working (if
{
“Status”: {
“code”: 610,
“request”: “geocode”
}
}
is the result it should show…)
Ouups. I blocked www-google-analytics.l.google.com in my firewall for all programs - removing that rule helped, now its working! (-:
Thank you for your help!
Oliver
August 24, 2012, 8:23
