Since I read on macOSXHints that everyone in the USA is shopping for teletubbie dolls today, it’s a good time to post things with a more international flavour.

Annard Brouwer has written an Address Book plugin that provides look-ups for European addresses through the ViaMichelin map service.

They may well be more accurate than other mapping services and come with pretty scaled images of significant landmarks:

Installation is easy. Download the script from Annard’s web site and place the plugin in your ~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins folder.

Restart Address Book and you will see a “Via Michelin map of …” option in the contextual menu that appear when you click on the label of a European address.

Other plugins exist which do something similar for European addresses and you can find them in the Address Book section of this site’s plugin list.

[Thanks, Annard]address book, maps, Michelin, contacts, Europe

Jonathan Nathan has updated his menubar access utility for Address Book, JABMenu.

The newest version (1.2) adds more options for international map services, the ability to compose an email to a group of contacts found through its look-up hotkey, the ability to add contact info into the foremost application (i.e. quickly insert contact details into a mail.app message—very handy!) and more.

Since I don’t have many friends in Desmoines, Iowa or Martha’s Vinyard, the increased number of international mapping options is very welcome.

People can now benefit from a much wider range of country-specific Google Maps services and mapping providers.

It works well too.

Clicking on the postal address of everyone’s favourite company (or at least its Australian outpost) pops up the right result (plus a slightly scary suggestion):

The new group email option is also useful, allowing you to select multiple contacts from a look-up search:

You can read the full changelog on Jonathan’s web site , where you can also download the updated version. It’s shareware (USD 10).address book, menubar, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, maps, saving time, google

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

This week Address Book and iCal get the lion’s share of the additions to the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.

The following items were added to the Address Book section:

• AddressBookQuickEntry (an alternate entry interface for contact information)
• AusAB (maps, travel directions and Sydney public transport times for Australian addresses)
• iAddressX (Address Book menubar utility)

The following were added to the iCal section:

• DoBeDo (a Dashboard widget for iCal ToDos)
• iCalViewer (“Streaming” desktop iCal events and ToDos)
• MenuCalendarClock (menubar utility for you iCal calendar, clock and ToDo and event information)

Mail.app itself scored two extra entries:

• anentry (AppleScript to email a NetNewsWire headline) in the Integration with other Apps section
• NetShred X (history and cache shredder for Mail.app and browsers) in the Added Functionality section

These additions bring the number of entries on the list to a round 120, all making Mail.app, Address Book and iCal easier, more efficient, more productive and (possibly) more fun to use.

I was recently upbraided by a friend for writing this blog as if I were an American. (Man, was I pissed. That was like so harsh).

What better way to celebrate Australia Day and inject local colo(u)r than with a set of Address Book plugins that deliver maps and travel directions for Australian addresses?

AusAB is a set of four plugins that offers Whereis maps of your contacts, public transport times to locations in Sydney, the option of setting a primary address for a contact and directions from one of the addresses on your own card to a selected address of another contact.

Like the StreetMaps plugin for the UK and the Google Maps plugin, the new options are available in a drop down menu when you click on a contact’s address tab.

It can only parse the most standard address formats at the moment, but the developer hopes to extend its range and add other features. He welcomes feedback – details are in the readme file on the disk image.

The Directions option will open a dialogue box asking for more details, like this:

In this case I am wondering how to get to work.

It’s clever too. It shows me exactly the route that I do drive:

AusAB is freeware and available from the developer’s web site (along with temperature widgets and other goodies for Australian Mac users).

It’s a bloody little ripper, mate!