Research Systems has announced that it will reverse an earlier decision to drop support for the OS X platform, saying that it is now committed to providing a native OS X releases of IDL and ENVI for OS X.

The OS X native versions will leverage Tenon Xtools X-Windows server to reduce development costs, and continue to offer IDL's existing Velocity Engine optimizations and multi-threading support. The company promises to provide a special pre-release of IDL for OS X to customers in the first quarter of 2002 and make a final release available based on customer feedback. IDL 5.5, the latest release of the cross-platform application that offers visual data analysis, will be the final release for Mac OS 8/9.

RSI will release ENVI for OS X "shortly thereafter," noting that it will announce a release date after the first release of IDL for OS X. ENVI is advanced application for procesing, analyzing and displaying multispectral, hyperspectral or radar remote sensing data.

RSI also said there will be a "corresponding modest increase" in maintenance and new license prices for the Macintosh platform in order to cover the associated development and support costs.

by MacNN Staff