Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« Web Form FAILsMainUnicodeChecker 1.16 »

Earth Addresser 3

303 words on

Earth Addresser Icon I has been four years since the last update to Earth Addresser, our application that gives you a nice visualisation of your contacts’ addresses in Google Earth. That’s a long time in the computer world.

Which is to say that the application had stopped working completely, mainly because Google maps stopped supporting external applications (for free). While this issue could be neatly – and surprisingly easily – fixed by using Apple’s CoreLocation framework which has been available on the Mac since OS X.8, actually doing so ended up being a lot of work.

A lot of work because four years since the latest version and essentially seven years since the creation of the code base are pretty much an eternity in Apple’s development world. While the Cocoa basics still work just fine, many things have been added to the system, while others have been deprecated. Hence a lot of work was necessary to make the application reasonably up-to-date and take advantage of current technologies.

Add to that the fact that this application started off as a hack based on a single class named ‘Magic’ which cried to be split up at least a little for sake of maintainability and that it really should use the Sparkle framework for automated updating, there was even more work to do.

That said, the work is done. While still a silly app, Earth Addresser is now a silly app which is slightly more up to date and not completely driven by Magic. It stopped working on Mac OS X.4-7. It gained first class updating (including Sparkle seems to have become a lot easier since the last time I tried it a few years ago), a preferences window to make a few possibly language or region specific choices user-configurable and a home on github.

Enjoy.

August 6, 2014, 12:42

Tagged as Earth Addresser, earthlingsoft, v3.

Comments

Comment by Peter Knight: User icon

I tried downloading the program 3 times, but each time my system (OS X 10.9.5) says the file is damaged. I heard your software is an easy way to create a .kmz file compared with what I have used before. I work from Excel spreadsheet. I certainly hope you will look into this. In the meantime, back to the laborious method of creating, then merging .kml files!

November 18, 2014, 16:58

Comment by ssp: User icon

Hi Peter, thanks a lot for your feedback.

Apple’s Gatekeeper technology seems to be the problem here. Unfortunately it gives an incorrect message to you which makes this confusing: The application is not broken, Gatekeeper just won’t let you launch it. (To make things even more confusing, this only happens on a few machines, for reasons I do not understand.)

You can work around this issue by temporarily deactivating Gatekeeper (go to System Preferences → Security & Privacy → General tab and select the radio button to allow App downloads from Anywhere). Earth Addresser should launch just fine with that setup. You can then revert Gatekeeper to its original setting and Earth Addresser should still launch fine in the future.

I am not 100% sure Earth Addresser is the perfect match for you as it expects the addresses to be in your Mac’s Contacts application rather than a spreadsheet. But I hope you’ll find a way to make things work!

November 18, 2014, 23:38

Add your comment

« Web Form FAILsMainUnicodeChecker 1.16 »

Comments on

Photos

Categories

Me

This page

Out & About

pinboard Links

People

Ego-Linking