<b>Apple Internet Address Detectors: a great utility, a significant "oops" and a conflict

It's cool Apple has released Internet Address Detectors 1.0.1, the first software to make use of Apple Data Detectors technology. The details and download URL are on their web page. However, as noted on several web sites, the download URL listed is currently incorrect; this URL should work.

This is a definite must-have utility (although since it uses contextual menus, it only works with Mac OS 8). It allows you to take any selected text that contains an Internet Address, in almost any application, and (via a control-click) take avariety of actions (such as launching a browser to load the URL's web page). It can even be used to work-around the lack of a built-in mailto feature in Navigator 4.03. Just remember, to use it this way, you must first highlight the mailto link text; simply control-clicking on the link will not work.

An Apple Data Detectors control panel allows for further customization.

Oops Lee Croft (at Electric Image) notes that their Electric Image software uses a control-click to access many of its commands. Apparently, this still worked correctly even with Mac OS 8's contextual menus installed. However, with the addition of Internet Address Detectors, the application's commands are overridden and all you get is a blank contextual menu. This is a general problem that appears to affect all programs that use a control-click in this way. For example, I have received reports of similar problems with Quark XPress, Freehand 7, and FileMaker Pro 3.x.

As suggested by Lee, Apple could solve this problem by modifying the Address Detector software either to allow the user to designate certain applications where IAD is not enabled or to allow the user to custom-define his own hotkey combination.

Conflict Two readers (Doug Smith and Eytan Bernet) have experienced a similar problem, where their machines froze or crashed at startup after installing Internet Address Detectors. Exact detailsvaried, but in all cases, their Macs were set to connect to a network server at startup and the freeze occurred as the network connection was attempted. You can work around the problem by manually connecting to the network after startup is over.

Update: Greg Evanitsky solved this problem by moving the Apple Data Detectors Extension to the end of the load order.

Do Lee has a likely related problem: "A conflict with the Kerberos Client extension, causing an unimplemented trap error as the system attempts to boot the Kerberos extension. Kerberos is the network authentication and encryption software by MIT which is used by many universities and other organizations. The solution to this problem is to have the Kerberos Client extension load before the Contextual Menu Enabler." E. Bond Francisco reported the same problem. [Note: the Enabler is new extension installed as part of the Address Detector software, and is separate from the Mac OS 8 Contextual Menu Extension.]