GraphPad programs and OS X 10.7 (Lion)

This FAQ discusses GraphPad programs and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.  For information on GraphPad products and other versions of OS X, please follow these links:

GraphPad products and OS X 10.9. Mavericks

GraphPad products and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

GraphPad products and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

GraphPad products and OS X 10.(X<6) Leopard, Tiger

LION (OS X 10.7)

What is Lion?

Apple released a version of OSX, 10.7 Lion, in July 20, 2011.  

GraphPad Prism 5 and Lion

The last release of GraphPad Prism 5  (5.0f) runs fine under Lion, but does not take advantage of new Lion features such as Full screen, Versions, Autosave, Resume, and Character Picker. Below are a list of known issues with earlier releases Prism 5 and Lion.  These issues have been corrected in Prism 6 and in 5.0f (a free update to Prism 5 owners).

• If you save a Prism file that has a PNG or TIFF image in it, the image may be unreadable when the file is reopened.  If this is the case, a large red 'X' will appear in place of the the missing image. This is only an issue for images that are created with the alpha channel.  A work around for this issue is to open the image file in Preview and resave the image without the alpha channel (Preview offers an option to save the image without the alpha channel) or save the image in another file format.
• If you hook an analysis constant to any analysis parameter dialog, the link is not "live" as it should be. If you change the data, the first analysis updates, but the hooked analysis constant does not, so the second analysis is not updated. In fact, all subsequent recalculations appear to hang until the user relaunches Prism. Recalculate All does not work. The only work around is to not use hooked analysis constants with Prism 5 and Lion.
• When you drag the navigator to be wider, you may see a vertical white bar obscuring some of the sheet names. This can be fixed by changing a choice in System Preferences. First quit Prism. Then drop the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, go to the General Preference pane, locate the choice "Show scroll bars" and choose  "Always". Then restart Prism.  If you don't want to change this preference (which would, of course, apply to all applications), an alternative would be to turn off the navigator completely and navigate using the bottom toolbar. 

 

GraphPad Prism 4 (and earlier) and Lion

 

GraphPad Prism 4 was written for the PowerPC (PPC) chip. It ran fine under Leopard and Snow Leopard due to a feature that Apple created called Rosetta. This let programs written for PPC chips run on Macs with Intel chips. It worked perfectly, without getting in the way. However, Lion shipped without Rosetta, so Prism 4 will not run. Write to us with your Prism 4 serial number (or any details/names from your order so we can track it down) and we'll help you purchase an upgrade to Prism 6.

 

 

GraphPad InStat and Lion

 

GraphPad InStat was written for the PPC chip. It runs perfectly under Leopard and Snow Leopard. Unless you knew where to look, you'd never even know that it ran under Rosetta emulation. Since Rosetta is not part of Lion, InStat Mac will not run at all under Lion. We wish there were some small fix to make it work, but this is not possible. It will require almost a complete rewrite. This is not something we will do right away.

 

What can you do? There are five alternatives:

• Avoid updating to Lion if you depend on InStat. 
• Set up your system to dual boot to either Lion or Snow Leopard. See the last section of this page. 
• If you purchased InStat Mac within 180 days (six months), we will give you a full refund upon request (and your statement that you will no longer use InStat).
• Use GraphPad Prism instead. It does everything that InStat does (except multiple regression) and much more. 
• Use GraphPad InStat for Windows instead of Mac. This makes sense if you have a Windows computer, or run Windows on your Mac. If you own InStat v3 Mac and upgraded to Lion, we will exchange your license for an InStat v3 Windows license.

 

GraphPad StatMate and Lion

 

GraphPad StatMate was written for the PPC chip. It runs perfectly under Leopard and Snow Leopard. Unless you knew where to look, you'd never even know that it ran under Rosetta emulation. Since Rosetta is not part of Lion, StatMate Mac will not run at all under Lion. We wish there were some small fix to make it work, but this is not possible. It will require almost a complete rewrite. This is not something we will do right away.

 

What can you do? You have four alternatives:

 

• Avoid updating to Lion if you depend on Statmate. 
• Set up your system to dual boot to either Lion or Snow Leopard. See the last section of this page. 
• We always offer a 90 day money back guarantee, but are doubling that period for people who have switched to Lion. If you purchased StatMate Mac within 180 days (six months), we will give you a full refund upon request (and your statement that you will no longer use StatMate).

• Use GraphPad StatMate for Windows instead of Mac. This makes sense if you have a Windows computer, or run Windows on your mac. If you own StatMate v2 Mac and upgraded to Lion, we will exchange your license for a StatMate v2 Windows license.

   

Any hope?

 

The Apple web site says nothing about Rosetta and Lion. We hope very much that either Apple or a third party will find a way to bring back Rosetta, and so allow PPC applications like InStat and StatMate to run under Lion. We have no idea how realistic this hope is.  Emails to Apple about this topic have not been answered.

 

Running both Lion and Snow Leopard on the same computer

It is possible to configure a Mac so it can boot to either Snow Leopard or Lion. This can let you take advantage of Lion some of the time, but reboot to Snow Leopard when you want to run InStat or StatMate (or any other program that won't run under Lion). GraphPad has never tried this, so we are simply passing along some links. We can not provide any help to those who set up a dual boot system. Here is one set of clear written instructions and here is a YouTube video that shows you what to do. I have been unable to find any instructions from Apple about how to set up a dual boot system, nor about the absence of Rosetta in Lion.