Supported Systems
APT is supported on 64-bit Intel Macs running Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or higher. (STScI ceased support for 32-bit Macs with the release of APT 20.2.)
APT requires a minimum of 512 Megabytes of RAM (memory), but we recommend 1 Gigabyte of RAM. Please see our memory discussion for more information.
You must have Java up to date on your Mac (which simply means that you have the latest Mac software update).
Depending on your institution's computer security measures (firewalls, blocked ports, etc.), you may initially have communication trouble with APT. If you have any concerns please see our firewall webpage.
1. UnInstall the previous version
Note: If you are going to install APT in the same folder as a previous version, please remove the previous version first. But if you are going to install in a separate folder, you would only need to uninstall to save disk space (and possible version confusion).To get rid of the old version: delete the entire folder where you installed it.
2. Download and Install
Choose your operating system: The installation page you enter next can choose the correct version for your machine for you - just click on the button that says "Download Now". (Or you can just choose the Mac OS X platform from the "Available Installers" table.) Then follow the instructions.
Proceed to the Installation...
3. Start
Once you have installed APT you invoke it by clicking on it. Go to the installation folder (default is in Applications/APT_20.0/) and double click on APT.
4. Help
There is a a series of short training movies which will help get you started (there are also web pages with screen shots available on the same page). APT also has documentation available from the "Help" menu (the right most menu on the menu bar).
If you can't find what you need, please contact us at help@stsci.edu.
How to find out about new releases
We maintain a distribution list for announcing new releases of APT. This may be helpful to people who install APT for others to use. Send an e-mail to majordomo@stsci.edu which contains the line:
subscribe apt-users
Troubleshooting
If there are problems with the installation you can turn on debug logging and sometimes that will reveal the problem. (For instance one user found that there was a permissions problem and all that was needed was to run "Repair Disk Permissions"). This debug log would also be useful to send us if you can't figure out the problem. Contact us (through help@stsci.edu) if you have problems with installation.
To turn debug logging on during installation:
- Open a terminal window.
- Navigate to the folder where the install-mac-apt.jar file was downloaded. (For instance cd Downloads.)
- Type: java -DTRACE=true -jar install-mac-apt.jar
To turn debug logging on while running APT:
- Go to the folder where you installed APT.
- Double click on the apt script in the bin folder.
The instructions are different on leopard:
- Open a terminal window.
- cd to the bin folder within the folder where you installed APT.
- Type: setenv JAVA_HOME `/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.6`
- Type: ./apt
Known Installation/Download Problems:
- You get a pop up that you don't have permission to install in a directory.
We have had two cases where the user got a pop up saying they did not have permission to install in a particular folder. We believe that this is due to special permissions (beyond the standard unix permissions) that Mac has. For instance if you would normally get a request to enter your password before you can write to your chosen installation folder, you may have this problem. One user worked around this by having a sys admin install for him, and the other user installed to a folder within his home folder. Please let us know if you experience this problem (help@stsci.edu) so we can learn more.
- Proposals are incomplete when loaded
Since the Java on a Mac is shared there can be rare but hard to diagnose problems if your Java extensions folder (/Users/username/Library/Java/Extensions) contains overrides to important Java code. In a recently diagnosed case the proposal would load but there would be no visits or no exposures in the visits. This was due to a xerces.jar file in the extensions folder.