Software for urban spatial analysis

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NOTE 1: some of these downloads are bigger than 20 megabytes. If you have a slow or unstable internet connection, consider installing a download manager first. On Windows I recommend wxDownloadfast. On Mac I am using SpeedDownload4 with good results. On Windows will also need software to unzip compressed files. If you do not have one, I recommend IZArc.

NOTE 2: To install this software on a Windows machine you will need to log in with Administrator privileges. I recommend installing for all users on the machine. While installing, do not put flash sticks into the USB port! And once you are finished installing, log out of Administrator and back into regular user.

1. Google Earth. The basic edition is free, and I teach from this edition. For a little more functionality you can buy Google Earth Plus USD$20 per year. But it is difficult to buy GE Plus because Google does not accept credit-card purchases from Afghanistan.

2. Gimpshop. This is a fundamental raster-image editor. A raster-image is any image made up of pixels, such as any image taken by a digital camera. Typical raster formats are .jpg, .tif, .gif, and .png.

3. Inkscape. This is a simple vector-graphics application. It creates and edits files in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. It also supports right-to-left Arabic text, so it can be used with Dari and Pashto. You just need to switch the keyboard-input of your system. If that does not make sense to you, please find out how to install and configure international settings on your computer.

4. Gnumeric. If you do not have a spreadsheet program, this is an excellent one available for Windows.

5. QuantumGIS, also known as Qgis. This is a user-friendly GIS application that looks similar to commercial products.

6. GRASS GIS. This is the core GIS program itself. Installation and startup of GRASS for Windows requires three packages:

• tcl/tk, from ActiveState.com. The free core version is fine for running GRASS.
• MSYS, a.k.a. 'minimal system.' This package will open a cmd window and ask for several responses. Note that you do not have MinGW installed on this system, so answer "n" to that question. Otherwise the installation should go smoothly and install to at the top level of your c:\ drive.
• The winGRASS package, which runs natively on Windows (version 6.3 or later). NOTE: once you have downloaded this package, unzip it to a new folder called grass at the top level of your hard drive directory [c:\grass\]. Do not install GRASS into the Program Files directory.
  One installed, create a shortcut of the file [c:\grass\bin\grass63.bat]. Place the shortcut on your desktop. You can start GRASS now, but it will complain until you create a new "location" using a georeferenced file.