In order to dress the product up a little, included in the package is Zenmap GUI and results viewer.  This offers a simple (dare I say familiar) interface to hide some of the complexity of the product.  This screenshot demonstrates a topology map produced by the Zenmap package when requested to display the connection relationship of a number of well-known web sites.

Over the past few years, Nmap has been a major beneficiary of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project where Google has funded internships for promising university students to spend time on major open source projects.

When asked by iTWire how much of the new version was a result of the GSoC program, 'Fyodor' said, "GSoC has been enormously helpful to the Nmap Project.  Of the 'Top 5 Improvements' in the release notes, SoC students started three of those projects (Ncat, Ndiff, and NSE), though many regular developers contributed.  Also, several of our current top developers were introduced to Nmap development as SoC students."

In 2009, the GSoC program was extended to include the new Policy Fellowship program.

Nmap v5.00 is available for immediate download from the main download page; release notes can be found here.  As always, there are versions for Linux (in particular RPM-based distros and Debian etc), Windows, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD and Apple Mac OS X.