How to Download, Install, and Start the APT Tools on Mac OSX

Update on Leopard:APT now works on Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard). But please note that Java 6 is not supported (the default is 5).

Supported Systems

The APT tools are highly graphical and interactive applications and therefore run best on a robust machine. Because of the recent upgrade to Java 5, APT is now only supported on Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) and Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard). (Earlier versions of Mac OSX will never be patched to be compliant with Java 5.) For small proposals in Phase I a 400Mhz G3 or equivalent and 256 Megabytes RAM (memory) should generally be sufficient, but for Phase II work we highly recommend a G4 or G5 with at least 512 Megabytes RAM. Please see our memory discussion for more information.

Additional System Configuration Issues:

You must have Java up to date on your Mac (which simply means that you have the latest Mac software update). The latest version when APT 17.2 was released was 1.5.0_13. You can check your Java version by using a terminal window and typing: java -version. On Leopard Java 6 is not supported (the default is 5).
If you have Acrobat Reader configured as your default PDF viewer, you will need Acroread 5.0 or higher installed on your machine. To check your version, start acroread and select "About Acrobat Reader" from the Help menu.
You should have the web browser plugin Shockwave 5.0 or higher for viewing the training movies. (In Safari you can check your version by clicking on "Installed Plug Ins" in the Help menu.)
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.

How to find out about new releases

We maintain an internal 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

1. UnInstall the previous version

Note: If you are going to install APT in the same directory as a previous version, please remove the previous version first. But if you are going to install in a separate directory, you would only need to uninstall to save disk space (and possible version confusion).

Here are instructions for getting rid of the old version:

Remove APT using the uninstaller (Uninstall_APT).
If some directories remain, it means that you and/or APT stored some files in the installation directory. You may want to double check that something you want (such as a proposal file from last year) is not in there.
After you have retrieved anything you want to save, delete the entire directory tree where you installed it.

Note that if you are not concerned that you may have stored files in installation directory, you can simply delete the installation folder without running the uninstaller.

2. Quit out of other applications (optional)

This is not required, but for some older machines there may be trouble installing if the resources of the machine are being used by other applications.

3. Download and Install

Choose your operating system: There is a different APT for each major platform. The installation page you enter next can choose the correct version for your machine for you (just click on the button below the words "Recommended installation for your platform"). Or you can just choose the Mac OS X platform from the "Available Installers" table and follow the instructions.

A few people have had the installation page say "There is no installer available for your platform. You can download an installer for another platform from the list below." This message is misleading. If you have one of the supported platforms, download the installer for your platform from the table. You just won't be able to use the installation button which detects what platform you are on.

Get the most out of your machine's memory: During installation you will be given the option of stating how much memory your machine has. (If you do not know, click the Apple menu icon and choose "About the Mac".)

Choose the first option if:

your machine has less than 512 MB of memory.
you are doing a site installation and some of your users have less than 512 MB of memory.

Choose the second option if your machine has between 512 MB and 1 GB of memory.
Choose the third option if your machine has 1 GB or more of memory.

Proceed to the Installation...

(If you are in Europe you should use the mirrored download site in Germany).

4. Troubleshooting

If the installer won't start please take a look at the console log (go to Applications>Utilities>Console). It may be obvious from this. For instance one recent user found that there was a permissions problem and all that was needed was to run "Repair Disk Permissions" (under Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility).

If the installer tells you that "errors occurred" during installation, look at the installation log which is located in: <installation dir>/APT*_InstallLog.log

Please contact us at help@stsci.edu if you have problems with installation that these logs don't clear up.

Known Installation/Download Problems:

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 directory (/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 directory.

Problem extracting from .zip file with StuffIt 9 and 10

One user discovered that he could not extract the APT installer from the .zip file using StuffIt 10. We were able to reproduce this problem with StuffIt 9. Upgrading to StuffIt 11 fixed the problem for both of us. Fortunately there is no problem with the built in Mac extractor (BOM Archive Extractor) which most people have as their default.

APT fails without any pop up

If APT fails without comment when you invoke it, it could be due to installing APT on top of a previous installation without deleting the previous installation first. (This problem started with APT 16.2.)

5. Start

Once you have installed the APT you invoke it by clicking on it. If you did not request icons to be placed on the desk top or the dock, go to the installation directory (default is in Applications/APT170/) and click on runAPT.

Once the program is started you will be presented with the main APT screen.

6. 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.