Welcome back to another installment of “What applications have problems with Mac OS X Lion and what you can do about it.” In last week’s column, I cited Lion-related symptoms of a few specific programs, as part of a more general look at how Lion deals with such incompatibilities. Today, I take a look at additional popular applications with potential Lion conflicts.
Let’s begin with two programs that include Safari extensions. While Safari 5.1 can run under Snow Leopard, it is mainly associated with Lion. Safari 5.1 has significantly modified the way it interacts with plug-in extensions. As such, numerous extensions that worked fine with Safari 5.0.x fail after you upgrade to Safari 5.1 in Lion.
Evernote
Evernote’s Web Clipper plugin is incompatible with Safari 5.1. An updated version is in development and should be available within the next few weeks. In the meantime, the Evernote folks recommend that you use their bookmarklet instead.
1Password
The 1Password Safari extension available prior to the release of Lion did not work with Safari 5.1 or Lion. AgileBits has released a new extension that does work; they offer a detailed set of instructions on how to install it. As of this writing, the extension is still considered betaware. A further “final” update, with more features, is expected soon.
In addition, 1Password 3 users should update to the latest version of the application (currently 3.6.5). “The update include improvements necessary for the latest version of the 1Password extension for Safari 5.1.”
When running Lion, I was unable to install the application update from the Check for Updates command in the utility itself. I kept getting an “Update Error!” message. As a work-around, I downloaded the trial version from the web. The new file linked to my existing data on launch. I re-entered my license and everything appeared fine.
For more tips on installing and working with these updates, see this AgileBits Forums page.
Dropbox
After I updated to Lion, the badge icons (e.g., green checkmarks on files and folders in a Dropbox folder) vanished. At the same time, the Dropbox command in contextual menus no longer appeared.
When I checked online, I found that others were reporting the same symptom. Oddly, some Dropbox users did not have these symptoms at all. So far, I have been unable to determine why they occur for some users and not others. Several fixes were suggested, especially reinstalling Dropbox and restarting the Mac. None of them have worked for me.
Pacifist
Pacifist is a popular utility for delving inside application packages. The current version is not yet compatible with Lion. However, a Lion-friendly version “is in the works and should be ready by the end of summer.”
Microsoft Office revisited
Last week, I noted that, while Microsoft Office for Mac 2004 will not run at all in Lion, the 2008 and 2011 versions should be fine. This turns out not to be entirely the case. A new Microsoft support document reveals a few Lion incompatibilities with even the latest versions of its Office software.
The major symptom is that “Communicator for Mac crashes when you send an IM or start an audio/visual call.” An updated version that addresses this issue is expected soon.
Other symptoms cited in the article include: (1) redraw and link problems with Reference Tools; (2) data labels invisible in Chart; and (3) Equation Editor not working correctly.
Finally, Microsoft promises an update to Office in the next few months that will add support for Lion’s Autosave, Versions and full-screen features.