Gwyddion – Open Source SPM analysis

We just discovered a very cool open source program for analyzing scanning probe microscopy (SPM) data files. There a number of incompatible and proprietary file formats for surface microscopies (AFM, MFM, STM, SNOM/NSOM) and getting data out from a microscope for further processing (including baseline leveling, profile analysis, and statistical analysis) can be a difficult task. Gwyddion is a Gtk+ based package that runs on Linux, Mac OS X (with MacPorts) and Windows and appears to do nearly everything that some expensive commercial packages (and some free closed-source packages) can do. Some of our colleagues were very happy to discover this piece of wizardry!