Brian Toth dot com

Version 2.1 of the plugins are now available for download. Many improvements have been made, thanks to the feedback I received for version 2.0.

• Major improvement to address the “spinning beach ball” issue when loading Google Directions with a large number of Address Book cards. Google Directions window should load significantly faster.
• Google Directions now recognizes the preferences setup in Google Maps Preferences.
• Google Directions pop-up menus are now sorted alphabetically.
• Improved error handling for more informative logs when something goes wrong.
• Added support for duplicate Address Book entries in Panther for Google Directions.
• Improved support for Address Book cards with no names.

Next on the to do list is improved support for addresses in Japan. (Now that I have a better understanding of how they should be handled.)

Yes, it’s only been one day since the release of version 2.0. With the help of a great group of people, I was able to find the cause of the “spinning beach ball of death” that was causing problems for some users. The problem occurs with large numbers of Address Book cards. Some users have over 3000 it would seem, and I did not take that into consideration during my development. This has been fixed.

Version 2.1 will also include support for the Google Maps Preferences when getting directions. I don’t know how I missed that one, but it’s been taken care of, so UK directions should be more useful. There are other small improvements that will be outlined later.

VersionTraker Pro was apparently still reporting version 1.3.1. I updated the bundle version numbers for 2.1 so hopefully all VersionTracker Pro users will be aware of the new version when it comes out.

I’m still looking into an issue with Panther and duplicate Address Book names (it doesn’t like duplicate names in the pop-up menus). I know how to get around it, I’m just looking for the best way to implement it were it won’t hurt performance.

Thanks to everyone that reported their problems and helped me track down the solutions.

This morning I uploaded the latest version of the Google Maps Plugin package. The biggest addition is a plugin that gives you the ability to look up directions between your Address Book addresses, or type in custom addresses for ones that don’t exist in your Address Book.

Download the latest version here (192 KB) for Mac OS X 10.3 or higher.

Check out the Google Map Plugin pages for information on how to install and use the new features. If you’re upgrading from a previous version, please replace all the old plugins with the new ones.

All feedback is welcome!

I noticed tonight (while testing version 2.0 of the Google Maps Plugin) that the “Did You Mean” suggestions are working again in Safari. I also happened to see that Google Maps found a few of my local streets even when misspelled, without having to offer a suggestion. I’m not sure if it did this before, but it’s nice either way.

Version 2.0 will include the ability to get directions for any of your Address Book addresses. It’s going through the final testing and touch-ups, so it should be available soon.

Google Maps now does hybrid street maps overlaid on satellite maps. Here’s an example. As long as the actual streets and buildings haven’t changed since the time of the images, this can be very useful for finding landmarks instead of trying to always find street names while driving.

It looks like Google Maps now has street maps of Japan.

It was brought to my attention that the problem with Google Maps no longer showing the “Did you mean:” suggestions in Safari is a Safari-only issue. By changing the User Agent in the Safari Debug menu it functions as expected. I first noticed this on June 18th, though it may have started before then.

Normally, when an address is misspelled or close-enough to an address Google Maps recognizes, it would offer a suggestion of the correct address on the side. This came in handy, especially for addresses in Canada, where Google Maps seems to be very picky about capitalization.

You can leave feedback for Google Maps here: http://www.google.com/support/maps/bin/request.py.

Last week I was excited to see that Google released their Google Maps API. I was hoping that this would allow me to add some advanced features to the Google Maps Plugin that users have been asking for. However, after looking at it, there seems to be a couple problems. First, you can only plot points based on longitude and latitude. Second, they don’t give you a way to get the longitude and latitude from an address, according to their documentation. There are some free geocoders out there for the US, but I didn’t see any for Canada or the UK. (If they do exist, please let me know.)

Also, using the Google Maps API means you have to register a web address with them to get a key that lets you embed the map on a web page. While you can apparently register 127.0.0.1 for local use, from what I’ve read in the Terms of Use and in the Google Maps API Discussion Group, it would seem that I would not be allowed to integrate a Google Map into a stand-alone desktop application (which would include a Widget as well). I may try to get some clarification on that down the road if necessary, but for the moment, I don’t need access to the API to get driving directions or maps for a single address.