KNOWLEDGEBASE - ARTICLE #1952

GraphPad Prism 5 and 6 and OSX 10.10, Yosemite

This FAQ (updated April 16, 2015) discusses issues with GraphPad Prism and Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.  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 10.7 Lion

GraphPad products and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

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

Problems Apple already has fixed

Exporting graphs or layouts as EPS files. Early releases of Yosemite did not let you export to EPS format. It seems to work but the exported .EPS file has a size of 0 bytes, so doesn't contain any information. Apple has fixed this problem with 10.10.2 released in mid January 2015. 

Clear colors.  The 'Clear' checkbox within the color picker doesn't work and looks corrupted. You cannot set colors to clear (transparent). Apple fixed this in 10.10.3 released in April 2015.

Color picker. The eyedropper control, used to pick a color from another part of the display, does not work under Yosemite when accessed from within the Format Graph or Format Axes dialogs. However it works fine when accessed from a shortcut (control click) menu, or from the main menu. Apple fixed this with 10.10.3 released in April 2015.

Two finger zooming. Zooming the magnification of a graph or layout by using two fingers on the track pad to pinch or stretch works really slowly. Workaround: Use the zoom slider at the bottom right of the Prism window. This was fixed in 10.10.3. 

Bugs fixed in Prism 6.0g

Impossible to use the left navigation system on very new Macs. It is essentially impossible to navigate using the left panel on very new Macbook Pros (new in april or may 2015)  with the ForceTouch trackpad. Using the bottom toolbar to navigate works fine. A related issue is that copy/paste can be incredibly slow.

Sharing files.  Prism 6 (but not Prism 5) has a share button to share Prism projects/sheets via various share services including email, twitter, text, and Facebook. This simply doesn't work on Yosemite. After you save your Prism project, you can attach it to an email or text, but not by using the share button within Prism. Similarly, you can export graphs or layouts in a variety of formats (but not EPS; see above) and then send them using any program, just not using the share button within Prism. 

Background color. If you use any color slider (second tab) of the color picker dialog, and then choose gray scale, and then choose to enter the brightness by typing a value (rather than using the slider), the background of the entire graph may turn gray. The workaround, is to always use the slider and not enter the brightness by typing.

The Export button at the bottom of the Export dialog is off screen. This problem is new to 10.10.3. Easy workaround click the button to reduce the size of the dialog, then click again to increase it again. Details with screenshots. 

 

Wingding fonts

If the characters you see on the WindDings panel of the Insert Greek.... Dialog all look the same, this faq explains why and how to fix it. 

Gatekeeper 

You need to set Gatekeeper to its default position, to allow software to be created by "identified developers" (which includes GraphPad Software, Inc.) to be installed. Or set the choice to "anywhere". But Prism cannot run if you tell set Gatekeeper to only run apps download from the Mac app store, because Prism isn't sold that way. You'll get a message using the phrase "unidentified developer". The first release of Prism 6.0f did not work with Gatekeeper using Yosemite (or Mavericks). We released an updated 6.0f on Sept 3, 2014 that works fine with Gatekeeper.

Gatekeeper is set in the Security & Privacy tab of System Preferences. 

Note: We have not tested Prism 5.0f Mac extensively, but it seems to run ok with some of the issues listed above. Prism 5.0f requires the third (anywhere) setting of Gatekeeper.  You can change the settings to "Mac App Store and identified developers" after Prism 5 is installed. 

  

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