The Laboratory of Plant Systematics in Leuven, Belgium today announced the release of iMap. It’s a free Mac-first mapping tool designed to work with large amounts of latitudinal and longitudinal data.
iMap supports TIFF, JPEG, PICT, GIF and PNG imagery, and is supplied with what the develope describes as “a plethora of ready-to-use maps.” New maps can be downloaded from the Internet, exported from GIS software or scanned. Users can then calibrate the maps fro within iMap, which can be used to plot symbols or characters on the maps themselves. You can also use iMap to create a QuickTime movie from a sequence of maps, to observe changes over time — the vegetation history of a certain area, for example. iMap can then be used to distribute maps at high resolution, or export them in BMP, PICT, Photoshop, JPEG, PNG, SGI, TGA, TIFF and QuickTime formats.
The software requires Mac OS 8 or higher and 64MB of RAM. The developer plans to release a Mac OS X-native version within a few weeks, and a Windows version will follow this summer.