Hey, does anyone have any suggestions for a good GPS mapping application for Mac OS X? I’m not interested in street maps for driving use. Rather, I would just like a simple app that can connect to a Bluetooth GPS receiver and log waypoints and routes in GPX format. It also needs to connect using NMEA and not Garmin or Magellan.

GPS Connect is an outdated app that doesn’t work with my Holux GPS Slim 240 bluetooth receiver. Terrabrowser seems to connect through a Bluetooth-to-Serial interface, but I haven’t done much testing with it to see if it will meet my needs.

I’ve love to use Google Earth Plus, but whereas NMEA bridges exist in Windows land, I can’t seem to find any for Mac OS X.

I also just found RouteBuddy for Mac OS X, which seems to work pretty well, except that it won’t have export to GPX until the 2007 version of the product. It’s costly, too, at $100.

MacGPS Pro looks like the best solution so far. It doesn’t look nor feel like a Mac app, but it works.

Blackberry Coolness:

My Blackberry connects to the Holux receiver. I’m going to try to use Spot for this functionality. Spot seems to save waypoints, but not tracks. It will dump a GPX file in the Blackberry filesystem.