If the original developer doesn't get to it, I may end up having to do it anyway.
The bad news is that timing would depend on when how quickly I can get my site's other components working in Joomla 1.5.
The good news is that I managed to splice in a cURL-based geocode search option in the advanced search component that I'd be happy to share if I can make it more like an installable component (and less of a hack job).