A post on theappleblog.com reviews six plugins that enhance Address Book.

It covers Brian Toth’s Google Maps plugin, Quicksilver’s Address Book plugin, Plaxo and Skype, JABMenu (menubar display of Address Book contacts) and how to build an Automator action that will automatically send a happy birthday email to friends.

If you are looking for more ways to make Address Book even smarter, you will find 22 plugins and utilities in the Address Book section of the Hawk Wings Plugins and Addons List.

If they don’t make you happy, check out Sbook5, a complete replacement for Address Book.Address book, plugins, tips, skype, google maps

Rejoice! Brian Toth’s Google Maps Plugin has been updated with some important new features.

First, it is now a universal binary.

Secondly, it now supports Google Earth, allowing you to see in even more detail where your contacts live or work:

Thirdly, it handles the country location of your contacts in a smarter way. The country location of addresses without an entry in the country field is now determined by the formatting of the address.

Lastly, it adds support for Europe and other localised Google Maps domains.

Google Maps Plugin is donation-ware and is available from Brian Toth’s web site .address book, Google maps, Google earth, contacts, maps, plugin, directions

Streetmaps UK is an Address Book plug in that maps UK address using the maps provided by www.streetmap.co.uk which are clearer than the MapQuest maps used in Address Book by default.

They are also pleasingly nostalgic to anyone who has used the London A to Z street directory:

The new version released today is a universal binary and offers several minor bugfixes.

Streetmaps UK is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .

The developer also makes a plugin using Google Maps for UK addresses. You can see a comparison of the maps in the two plugins in an earlier Hawk Wings post.address book, addresses, maps, plugins, streetmaps UK, Google maps

I am a big fan of Services in Mac OS X, especially of the way that they speed me up in Mail and elsewhere.

While plugins already exist to give you access to maps for contacts in your Address Book, today Robert Stainsby released a Service that makes Google Maps and ZoomIn Australia and New Zealand maps available for the text of any address that you select in any app.

Tonight I was reading a PDF about a meeting tomorrow.

With this Service installed, all I had to do was select the text of the address in the PDF, and then select the mapping service from the Services menu:

It switches to my browser and open a map (in this case) from ZoomIn Australia that shows me exactly where I need to go:

Very nifty. I’ll can see myself using this a lot.

MappingService is donation-ware and can be downloaded from Robert’s web site .address book, Google maps, services, productivity, zoomin, maps, where do you want to go today, helpful apps

Brian Toth has updated his series of Google Maps plugins for Address Book.

The new version (2.4) comes in a beta 3 for PPC Macs and beta 2 for Intel Macs.

Initial support for addresses in some European Countries — Italy, Germany and France and perhaps Spain — has been added to the existing support for United States, UK, Canadian and Japanese addresses.

The new betas also feature a preference pane that allows you set a default location and various other options in the way addresses are parsed:

The plugins are donation-ware and are available from his web site .

[Via TUAW ]address book, plugins, Google maps, europe

A web site called Butter Fat offers you the opportunity to track the path of your emails using Google Maps, using geographical lookup provided by hostip.info.

Paste in the headers of an email and it traces the jumps from server to server. If you choose your email carefully, it can also show you the location of a particular server.

It may not do a very good job. I discovered, for example, that the mail server at my new web host TextDrive is housed in the middle of Montgomery Field Airstrip in San Diego:

Perhaps it does a better job with .Mac. At least, the trace places the server on the same map as Infinite Loop, in leafy September Drive:

Who knows? It is, at any rate, an entertaining and interesting way to waste thirty minutes or so.email, traceroute, Google maps, dotmac, .mac, textdrive, servers, Cupertino

Various plugins bring map options to Address Book, but widgets are not so lucky.

Two tips on macOSXHints, one for the People (or White Pages) widget and one for the Business (or “Yellow Pages”) one, show you how to modify the javascript contained in their packages so that you can use Google Maps with them. Quite Handy.map, widget, javascript, white pages, yellow pages