GraphPad Prism and OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

This FAQ discusses issues with GraphPad programs and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain 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 10.7 Lion

GraphPad products and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

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

MOUNTAIN LION (OS X 10.8)

What is Mountain Lion?

Apple released a new version of OS X, 10.8 Mountain Lion in July, 2012. 

GraphPad Prism 6 and Mountain Lion

Gatekeeper is a new security feature in Mountain Lion. It's objective is to protect against malicious applications from uncertified and pirated app stores. Prism 6 includes a "digitally signed certificate" making GraphPad an "identified developer" and so will run with the default settings. If you set Gatekeeper to only allow applications downloaded from the Mac App store, then of course Prism 6 won't run (since it is not available on the Mac App store) .

GraphPad Prism 5.0f and Mountain Lion

The final  release of GraphPad Prism 5 (5.0f) works fine with Mountain Lion. If you own an earlier release of Prism 5, the update is free. The only issue is Gatekeeper ...

Gatekeeper is a new security feature in Mountain Lion. It's objective is to protect against malicious applications from uncertified and pirated app stores, a common point of entry for malware. Prism 5 will not run (and cannot install) with the default setting of Gatekeeper.  You need to go to the Security&Privacy panel of the System Preferences dialog (click the Apple in the upper left of your screen and choose System Preferences). It presents you with three options to restrict the launching of applications:

 

 

To install and run Prism 5, you must select the third choice, to allow applications downloaded from anywhere to run. Otherwise you'll see a message about "unidentified developer". 

If you don't select that third option, you won't be able to install or launch Prism 5. Apple will present a message:

   "InstallPrism5.mpkg comes from an unidentified developer. Your security preferences are set to block installation of applications from unidentified developers"

Earlier releases of Prism 5 and Mountain Lion

 

Below are a list of known issues with earlier releases of Prism 5 and Mountain Lion.  These issues have all been corrected in Prism 6 and 5.0f. 

• Pasting numbers and titles from Excel or Word documents into a Prism data table may cause Prism to crash.  This is an issue when using Excel 2008 or 2011 (or OpenOffice); we did not test earlier versions.  The problem is caused by Prism parsing the HTML clipboard entry that Excel creates.  It happens regardless of the setting you select in Paste Special.

These are suggestions to work around this issue:

• First, paste the Excel table onto a Graph or Layout sheet.  Double-click on the table to open it (as if you were going to edit the table).  Copy the contents of the table.  Now, go to the data table and paste the clipboard contents into the data table.  Prism should now paste the data correctly. 
• Save the data as a .CSV file from Excel, and then import that into Prism.
• Copy-paste from Excel to Numbers (part of iWork) and then copy-paste into Prism.
• Use Numbers instead of Excel.

• 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 were saved in a format that includes an alpha channel to encode transparency.  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 Mountain 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 Mountain 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 and Mountain 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.

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GraphPad InStat and Mountain 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 or Mountain Lion, InStat Mac will not run at all under Mountain 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 or Mountain Lion if you depend on InStat. 
• Set up your system to dual boot to either Mountain 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. We will reduce the price of Prism Mac by $100 for anyone who owns InStat Mac and switched to Lion or Mountain Lion. 
• 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 or Mountain Lion, we will exchange your license for an InStat v3 Windows license.

GraphPad StatMate and Mountain 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 Mountain 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 or Mountain Lion if you depend on Statmate. 
• Set up your system to dual boot to either Mountain 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 Mountain 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 or Mountain Lion, we will exchange your license for a StatMate v2 Windows license.

   

Running both Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard on the same computer

It is possible to configure a Mac so it can boot to either Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion. This can let you take advantage of Mountain 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 Mountain 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 clearly written instructions for setting up a dual boot system and here is a YouTube video that shows you what to do.  We 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 Mountain Lion.