Garmin to offer Mac Support!!?!!?!?!??
Garmin has announced future support for the Mac platform. Wow. This will make Garmin the first company ever to actually have a piece of GPS hardware with control software on the Mac OS X.
There have been many GPS packages for the Macintosh, but none that actually allow manipulating the set of base maps on the device or otherwise interacting with the proprietary features of the targeted device.
Neat. After 6 or so years of owning a Magellan GPS receiver and suffering with their horribly bad windows client, it looks like I’ll be purchasing a Garmin in the next year. Given the level of response to a number of previous posts I have made in regards to the state of GPS on Mac, I’m betting that Garmin will be seeing quite a bit of pent up demand for their products.
I really hope that their client is decent. Please make it a native app — Carbon or Cocoa — and please make it look and feel like a real Macintosh application.
January 11th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
Garmin were hiring one or more Mac developers before the holidays. Looks like they found someone(s?) in or willing to move to Tempe, AZ. I’m excited about this too - but it might not be the best news for the GPS software I was working on in my spare time.
January 12th, 2006 at 12:26 am
I spoke with some of the Garmin guys at the show, and they were showing their work in progress on the Mac. They’re using Cocoa.
-jcr
January 12th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Actually, Garmin won’t be the first GPS company with hardware and software compatible for the Mac. TomTom has a Mac OS X client application available for free download today. I found this out when recently shopping for a GPS device for the car. It was between a TomTom GO 300 and a Garmin StreetPilot i5. I only went with the Garmin because I read that the TomTom’s map data was not very up-to-date (at least for the U.S.).
I’m very excited that after years of begging/praying/flaming/hacking, Garmin finally listened. We should definitely hold Garmin to their commitment to have all their software Mac-compatible by the end of 2006.
January 12th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Now it’s TiVo’s turn…
May 11th, 2006 at 10:50 am
[...] Given that Garmin has announced Mac compatibility in future products, it is about time for an upgrade anyway. [...]
February 15th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Garmin seens like they are listening, and for now l’m happy with them , your right TOMTOM”S map data is not up to date, and if you compare the two, by far Garmin is a better choise, although they muct address the compatablity problem with their products.
May 7th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I use it with my powerbook and it works like a charm now. this was a huge step up for garmin, i remember struggling with my earlier versions and making my son let me use my laptop