In a post a few days ago, James Fee mentioned QGIS, an open source GIS application. I have since tried it, and find it to be pretty nice.
I use a Mac at home, and have tried (repeatedly) to use GRASS to do some personal projects. I have never gotten it to work, and it often gives such poor feedback on errors that I’ve had no idea what went wrong. I think, after 20+ years in software development, that I am pretty adapt at using software, but GRASS has me stumped.
Enter QGIS. First off, it uses the native OSX interface, not X11 - a definate plus in my book. Installation was easy (as it is with most OSX software), and I was up and running in no time. I grabbed some shapefiles from the Sedgwick County website and was able to add them to my project without any pain or frustration.
The biggest problem I’ve had so far is on label collisions. Label placement not fully operational, but not that big of deal for the simple stuff I’ve been attempting with it. Another problem I’ve encountered is that fill patterns are not preserved going from Map Composer to printed output. Easily worked around and something that will likely be fixed at some point.
Performance is good on my G4 iBook with snappy redraws. Map Composer sometimes has a bit of trouble keeping up with rendering, but again, not a big problem. I have a P4 tower that I’ve loaded Debian on and will try QGIS on that later.
All-in-all a very nice application and one that I’ll be using for my personal mapping projects.
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