Brian Toth dot com

I forgot to mention that I put up a small PostCheck update a couple days ago.

In certain situations, the USPS will return multiple possible correct addresses for the address you’re trying to standardize. This is most common when your address is missing a specific unit number. In some cases, each unit has its own ZIP+4 Code. The USPS returns a default ZIP+4 Code to PostCheck which is not always the correct one for your address.

The 1.8.2 update no longer adds the +4 portion to the ZIP Code when multiple addresses are found, but will still fill in the standard 5-digit code. This is the safer way to go and should make batch-updates more reliable.

PostCheck 1.8 is now available. I’ve added abbreviation options for cities, street names, units, and common street suffixes. City abbreviations are now disabled by default. Common suffixes are Drive (Dr.), Road (Rd.), Street (St.), Avenue (Ave.) and Boulevard (Blvd.). I’ve found many times I want the main part of the street to not be abbreviated, but I don’t need every address to end with these common suffixes written out.

Feedback is welcome.

A quick bug fix for accented characters and symbols and other UTF-8-related things. I’m not sure how this one slipped through, perhaps because I don’t have any accented characters in my address book. The bug was reported on the 18th and hopefully no one else has been affected by the problem.

As usual, the update can be downloaded from the PostCheck page. Thanks!

PayPal seems to be working again. =)

PayPal seemed to have stopped sending out their notifications to my website for successful payments as about 10:15 this morning (EST). So, if you purchased PostCheck since that time I apologize, usually after payment you would immediately receive your link to the full download. I imagine it’ll kick in sometime soon, as I’ve had this happen once before. If you don’t get your notice in a timely fashion, please send me an email and I’ll manually setup an account for you.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

It’s been a while since I’ve made any updates. My day job has been very busy lately so this PostCheck update is just a small one.

I’ve added an option in the PostCheck Options window to disable the lookup of +4 ZIP Codes. Since I got an iPhone, I’ve noticed that many of my contact’s addresses wrap to another line with the +4 codes. I didn’t care how this looks, and there’s no sense in having ugly addresses on such a nice phone, is there?

I have some other little things in store for PostCheck, too, they just take more testing.

Head on over to the PostCheck page to download the latest version (free update for all current PostCheck customers).

I’ve known about this for a while now, but today I guess I can publicly mention it. Leopard’s Address Book has replaced MapQuest with Google Maps as it’s built-in mapping service. It doesn’t do directions though, and my Google Maps Plugins are completely compatible with Leopard, so you can continue to use them if you rely on having directions available from the context menu.

However, this post is not about my Google Maps Plugin, rather, it’s about PostCheck! Leopard’s built-in Google Maps function works best when your address are formated properly using USPS standards. (My Google plugins work best if they are too, but have ways to get around some common issues.) PostCheck will format your US addresses to proper standards and fill in missing information such as ZIP+4 codes.

Once your addresses have been formated with PostCheck, Google will have much more success finding it. Give the demo version a try and if you like you what you see, the full version is only $10 and includes the time saving batch lookup feature to get all of your address up-to-date.

Pushing Daisies is awesome.