First thing you'll need to do it so convert files into a straight uncompressed binary format. The simplest way to do this is to use Wilbur, as Greason Wolfe suggested. Open Wilbur, then use File>>Open and select your GIF. Use Surface>>Map Info and set the Top to 90, Left to -180, Right to 180, Bottom to -90. Now use Surface>>Rotate>>Flip Vertically to flip the world data vertically. Then use Filter>>Mathematical>>Span with a Low value of 0 and a High value of 11000 to rescale the terrain to approximately real values from its original 0..255 grayscale values. Finally, use File>>Save, select MDR Surface as the file type, enter a file name, and click Save. Click OK on the "Enter MDR File Save Parameters" dialog. Exit Wilbur.
Now you will have an MDR file full of values ranging from 0 to 11000 meters and flipped vertically to compensate for a difference of opinion between Wilbur and FT regarding how data should be represented in the file. Using an MDR file and the extra work done in Wilbur will ensure that the data is described well enough that FT can easily ingest it.
Open FT, and use File>>New. On the Type page of the new world wizard, select Binary File and click Next. On the Binary Data page, click the Choose Elevation File button to bring up the Binary Data dialog. Now enter the name of the MDR file you saved from Wilbur (the ... button will let you pick it - you will need to change "Files of Type" on the Open dialog to "All Files"). Click OK on the Binary Data dialog, then click Next then click Finish. Your terrain data will appear in FT. The file you indicated above is relatively low resolution and only has 255 gray levels, which will make its reproduction in FT a bit low resolution.
See also http://www.google.com/#q=import+bina...Terrains&hl=en for more information on this topic.
If you intend to modify this data in FT I do recommend upping the world editing resolution using Map>>World Settings and setting a custom editing size of 2048 in the Editing tab. Follow this up with Tools>>Actions>>Burn Into Surface and then you'll have data in FT without any external dependencies.
As far as the speed and user interface of FT goes, yep, they are slow and elderly. FT was conceived in 1997 as an offshoot of Wilbur focused on making FCW files for ProFantasy's CC2 product with first product delivery in 2000. At the time of its development, a P2-450 with 256MB of RAM running Windows 98 was the hot thing. It has no hardware acceleration for any of its graphics and its algorithms are not optimized for a modern processor architecture. I do understand your frustration with the sometimes arcane way of doing things, especially by today's standards.
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