Brian Toth dot com

It was brought to my attention that the phone number option in the Google Maps Plugin does not really work as intended in most browsers. In Safari, it looks as it’s supposed to:

It also works in OmniWeb, if you set the browser to identify itself as Safari, because otherwise Google Maps will not load.

In the meantime, Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, and Opera users may just want to turn that option off in the preferences. I did not check Internet Explorer, I don’t have it installed and I don’t plan on digging it up. I would like to find a way to make it work for Gecko-based browsers, if possible. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to share them!

Yes, it’s a bug fix.

A small bug that may affect some users and cause Address Book to crash has been taken care of. While I was at it, I added support for the Japanese postal mark. Addresses that contained the mark would not launch the web browser when selecting the Google Map menu item.

Get the update here and see what was changed on the History page.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Today I have uploaded version 2.2 of the Google Maps Plugin. This version contains many improvements over version 2.1.1. The most significant addition is improved support for Japanese addresses. As long as the address is formated similar to how Apple formats theirs, Google Maps should do a good job of finding the address. Google Maps does not work well with postal codes in Japan and has no need for the “Further Divisions” field, so I have added Preferences to ignore those two fields (which are turned on by default).

To read the full list of changes, please see the Google Maps Plugin version history page. For troubleshooting, please first look over the Questions page. If you cannot find an answer there, you may contact me directly. All feedback is welcome!

So, I had some time today to add some more “features” to the Google Maps Plugins. These new additions apply to the Directions window. The contact drop-down menus now display icons next to them to make it easier to distinguish between individuals and companies — the same icons that Address Book uses.

Also new are improvements to the sorting of the names in the contact drop-down menus. You can now set whether you like to sort your contacts by last name or first name in the Preferences window. The plugin will also detect your Address Book preference for listing contacts by first name first, or last name first.

You can get the latest build on the beta page.

Now my goal is to thoroughly test this new build. I don’t want to have to release version 2.2.1 the same day as version 2.2, so I would appreciate any feedback on this latest beta. Thanks!

There is a new beta build of the Google Maps Plugin available. This update includes working map lookups for Japanese addresses and the additional option to include the contact’s phone numbers on the map. Check it out and let me know what you think. There’s still a few more things planned for the 2.2 release.

Today I added a page for Google Maps Plugin beta releases. I thought this would be a worthwhile way to test and get feedback on new versions before advertising and promoting an official release. Obviously, once the new version is stable, the beta will be officially released and added to the usual Mac software sites.

Feel free to test and comment on the betas, just don’t add them to any software download sites. Thanks.

While it is slightly embarrassing to pump out two updates, in such a short timeframe, to correct for unexpected problems — it seems that version 2.1.1 fixed the bug that would stop the Google Directions window from appearing for some users.

Knock on wood.

At any rate, I’d like to say thanks to a few users in particular that let me bug them repeatedly about their console logs. You know who you are. I hope you get a lot of use out of the plugins.