It would seem that the choices for full-featured navigation software for the Mac have been shrinking over the past few years. For, example Maxsea and Maptech have both dropped Mac support, and Navimaq is currently off the market. The fact of the matter is that there is just not a large customer base for navigation software, and the companies making these products are in an arms race to add features. Building software is expensive, and building a cross-platform product, i.e. Mac and PC is almost as much trouble as building two completely separate products. Counting the beans quickly demonstrates that the estimated 2% to 8% of the market that owns Macs may not justify doubling the cost of producing a product, especially for these relatively small software companies. Nonetheless, there are a few choices still out there for Mac users—just don’t expect to be able to do high-end stuff like radar overlays or 3d bathymetry. Some users may have success running PC software with VirtualPC, but compatibility and hardware configuration issues may be an issue.

Here’s a short list of Mac nav products still on the market:

• GPSNavX
• GPSy
• Navimaq (not currently shipping)
• MacGPS Pro