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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/10/google_map_addres.jpg” height=”146″ width=”190″ align=”right” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ align=”right”/Amit Agarwal at the Digital Inspiration blog has flipped the Google Maps API around so anyone can find the exact street address of any point on a street by clicking on it. In other words, if you can point to a great restaurant on a city map but don’t know the address to give for driving directions, simply navigate to the site and click. One of those features you really wish was implemented in Google Maps itself, but it’s a pretty sweet mash-up to use in the meantime. div class=”related”a href=”http://digitalinspiration.com/community/location.html”Find Postal Address of any Location on Google Maps/a [Digital Inspiration via a href="http://www.redferret.net/?p=11530"Red Ferret Journal/a]/div/p br style=”clear: both;”/
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As the Android team intimated when T-Mobile’s G1 was launched, Exchange server support would have to come from third-party software developers. The first sign of this is ContactsSync, a free app distributed by net project-management software maker Wrike.

To be clear, this isn’t full Exchange syncing, it’s just a way to dump Exchange contacts to your G1 phone. Every time you sync, whatever changes made to your contacts on your server get sent to the phone. It’s not yet two-way—so no using your phone to update your server-based contacts—but the developer says it’ll add that functionality soon.

I asked Wrike’s Valerie Sinitskaya about calendar and email and she told me that calendar syncing was dependent on Android’s API—it’s not yet available. As for email, she says, “Users can access their email from Exchange using IMAP, so we don’t have plans to sync email.” Fair enough, though I do still fear for Android, business-wise, if all we get is a piecemeal network of apps, each doing a part of what a mobile Outlook could do. [Wrike]

New webapp SonicSwap hosts your iTunes playlists on the web and streams the music in them free and legally without requiring you to perform tedious file uploads or use any of your computer’s upload bandwidth. Unlike previously mentioned Anywhere.fm, SonicSwap doesn’t host your gigabytes of music files—you just give it your current iTunes playlists, and it pulls the tracks and videos named in them from YouTube, and recreates them in a drag-and-drop web-based version of iTunes. Sign up for a free SonicSwap account, upload your iTunes playlists either via the web site or using an iTunes plug-in, and you can listen to and share your library’s playlists (including Smart Playlists) at SonicSwap, which includes video playback of the YouTube clip. Here’s a full screenshot what it looks like.

Here’s a direct link to this playlist at SonicSwap so you can try it out.

In my tests, the Java applet that you upload your iTunes Library.xml file with failed, but the iTunes plug-in is an alternative method. Here’s a video from the SonicSwap folks that explains how the app works.

Once you’ve uploaded your library, you can make it public, add friends, find other playlists, and even download others’ playlists to your current library on your computer. TechCrunch reports that because of the YouTube API, occasionally you’ll get a bum song (like a karoake version), but my cruise through other users’ playlists yielded good results.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Free application RTM Notifier periodically checks in with popular to-do list web site Remember the Milk and displays notifications for time-sensitive tasks. The goal of the application is two-fold: On one level, it’s just a notification tool, displaying pop-up alerts for due tasks. Beyond that, it’s a desktop entry point for your RTM tasks. Both features could be improved upon (especially since RTM has an open API), but if you manage all your to-dos with RTM, it might be worth checking out. RTM Notifier is a free download, requires Adobe AIR.

Netflix will introduce their API to the public tomorrow at the Experience AJAX conference, and according to ReadWriteWeb, it will allow free access to movie data and stats stored on their servers. This doesn’t mean that anyone will be able to write a streaming video app for any random piece of open hardware. However, it does mean that people will be able to will be able to integrate movie info (ratings, related films, etc…) into widgets, like the ones you’d see on Typepad or Facebook. Or more importantly, create apps that allow for queue management (yes, this API is read and write capable).

So potentially, non-PC gadgets that are running the Netflix streaming service could have the ability to directly add and reorder movies to the queue — saving the trouble of having to pull out your computer when you think of something you want to add on the fly.

Data will be accessible via REST and Javascript APIs (no JSON, though), plus ATOM feeds. The API will also be usable for commercial purposes, so if you have a Netflix killer app for the iPhone planned that you think could make you some money, you’d better get to work. Netflix’s API will be available starting tomorrow at the Netflix developer site, which you will be able to sign up for by clicking here tomorrow, and not a moment earlier. [Netflix Developer via ReadWriteWeb]

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Good news, developers of the world — the Netflix API will be open to all starting tomorrow. As of October 1st, absolutely anyone can self-signup by visiting the read link, and while details are a tad sketchy at the moment, it sounds like this could hold some serious promise. The API itself allows access to data for 100,000 movie and TV episode titles, is completely free and (most importantly) allows commercial use. In other words, it’s kosher if a bright developer out there somewhere feels like “creating an iPhone app to sell for $0.99 (Netflix’s words, not ours).” On the technical side, the API includes a REST API, Javascript API and ATOM feeds, and it also uses OAuth standard security “to allow the subscriber to control which applications can access the service on his or her behalf.” It’s time to get creative, folks.

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Google made the Android 1.0 SDK available today, following the announcement of the G1 phone yesterday. The 1.0 signification means it’s technically out of beta, and you can develop without fear of major changes to Android’s core programming. According to Mobile Whack, the only changes from the 0.9 release are some bug fixes and API inclusions. Download it here. [Mobile Whack]