Apple released a new version of OSX, 10.6 Snow Leopard, on Aug. 28 2009.

Prism 5

We know of one problem using Prism 5.0b on Snow Leopard: Fill patterns don't render well. We recommend that you use solid fills for bars, and simply avoid fill patterns altogether if you use Snow Leopard (and even otherwise, fill patterns are a hold over from the days of plotters, and solid fills look better). It is likely that Apple will fix this glitch in Snow Leopard. If they don't, we'll try to bypass the problem in release 5.0c. 

Other minor glitches:

• Black colors appear gray when the graph is exported to a pdf file using CMYK colors, and viewed in Preview. Choose RGB colors instead, and the pdfs look fine.  Or export a tiff file with CMYK colors. Note that the pdf file is fine, but is just rendered incorrectly by the new version of Preview.
• The Send-to-Powerpoint button and command don't work. Use Copy and Paste instead.
• When running a Prism script, the script log is always empty.
• Editing sheet names in the navigator looks ragged.
• The slider on the info page separating info constants from notes looks corrupted.
• Exporting to the PICT format doesn't work. 
• Exporting using the monochrome color model (to export colorful graphs as black and white) doesn't work.
• If you save a Prism file as XML, its icon is blank.
• One person found that the updater from 5.0a to 5.0b did not work under Snow Leopard. But the full 5.0b installer worked fine.

 We will investigate these problems, and any others we discover or are told about, and fix in release 5.0c coming soon. Let us know if you encounter other problems. 

InStat, StatMate, and Prism 4

InStat 3, StatMate 2 and Prism 4 use an older style of Mac programming. They run perfectly on current macs using an Intel chip, but do so by relying on Apple's Rosetta system. Apple created Rosetta so programs written for the earlier generation of Macs that use a PowerPC chip will also work on newer Intel Macs. This is truly amazing software that just works. You don't even know it is there.

With OSX 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard), Rosetta was automatically installed and simply works when it is needed. You don't have to configure it, and won't even know when it is running. The only exception is that a few people have had problems after updating to OSX 10.5.6. This page from the Apple web site explains how to fix the problem, which requires running the 'combo update' rather than the 'incremental update' .

Rosetta is not automatically installed with  OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard). If you are updating to Snow Leopard and plan to run InStat 3, StatMate 2, or Prism 4, click the "Customize" button in the Mac OS X Snow Leopard installer and select the option to install Rosetta. 

If you don't install Rosetta at the time you install Snow Leopard, or get a new Mac without it,  InStat, StatMate and Prism 4 will still work just fine. The first time you run one of these programs under Snow Leopard, OSX detects that you need Rosetta and provides an easy way to install it. You only have to do this once. Rosetta will be installed from Apple's server if you are connected to the internet. Otherwise, you'll need to insert your Mac OS X Snow Leopard installation disc, open the Optional Installs folder, and double-click Optional Installs.