QGIS 1.6 'Copiapó' released

The folks working on Quantum GIS (QGIS) have recently released a new version of their popular open source desktop GIS application that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. 

Version 1.6 can now be downloaded from qgis.org via http://download.qgis.org.

There are a lot of new features and bug fixes in this version, adding even more power to use QGIS as a viable analysis platform.  You can read the entire list of new features here.

Be sure to check out the included analysis plugins for:

• OGR Converter: Convert between more than 30 vector formats, including shapefile, kml, mapinfo, gpx...
• Interpolation: Interpolate vector data using Triangular Interpolation (TIN) or Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW)
• Raster Based Terrain Analysis: Convert DEM data to Slope, Aspect, Ruggedness, or Total Curvature
• Spatial Query: Topological operations include contains, equals, intersects, touches...
• GDAL Tools: Adds a new drop down list to your menu that includes many GDAL functions like warp, translate, or contour.  This adds a lot of the power of GDAL without the need to write scripts.
• fTools: Adds a new dropdown list to your menu with many geoprocessing and analysis functions such as buffers, joins, nearest neighbor, vector grid creation...
• GRASS: Adds a suite of tools that allow you to use much of the GRASS functionality within the QGIS application

If you are relatively new to GIS, and would like to try QGIS, we've just added an introductory tutorial to the GIF's Quick Start Guides based on this latest software release.  Check out the pdf and accompanying data for Introduction to QGIS: Basic geoprocessing and making a map layout.