OpenOSX on Friday introduced GrassPro, a suite of Geographical Information System (GIS) applications and utilities that run on Mac OS X v10.3 systems equipped with X11 installed. GrassPro costs US$50 on CD or $40 if downloaded; a $5 CD discount is available for members of educational institutions.
GrassPro comprises OpenOSX’s implementation of the open source GRASS 6.0.0 software, as a standalone drag-and-drop application that’s also available for separate free download. The 6.0.0 release features an overhauled user interface, new vector engine, improved 3D interface with voxel capabilities, and the ability to integrate with PostgreSQL, mySQL and other database management systems.
Also included with GrassPro is MapServer, which can serve dynamically generated maps using user-selectable raster, vector, text and symbol layers. MapServer has been built with Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) support for more than 40 raster file formats. GrassPro also touts Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), which features 60 tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian datasets and GIS Utilities, which adds 30 command-like GIS tools used to convert files and more.