[ferret_users] Poll for Mac Ferret users

[Ansley Manke <ansley.b.manke@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
As Billy reported earlier, when running Ferret under some of the newer Mac operating systems, there is an issue with saving gif images using the FRAME command. Our current Ferret executables are built under OSX 10.5 Leopard, and the problem arises on 10.7, Lion.  There's a timing problem, so that FRAME crashes Ferret when running fast, as in a script, but generally not from the command line. A workaround is to put in a pause statement or spawn out and sleep for a short time before issuing a FRAME command, or of course to run in -gif mode so that the images are written to a file and not to an X-window first. It seems that the X11 libraries aren't completely compatible between the different versions of OS X.

We're going to try to build Ferret under 10.7 or 10.8, and see whether it's compatible with previous OSX 10 systems, but it brings up some questions about Ferret support on the Mac. 

If you use Ferret on the Mac, would you write back to me, not the list, and tell me:

• What version of the operating system do you run?
• Would you be able to upgrade your OS if needed to stay current with Ferret? Or how willing/unwilling are you to do so?
• We are planning to make  PyFerret available for the Mac later this summer.  Do you use Python now? (PyFerret will be useful for everyone, giving us new functions, even for those who know little about Python).

Any other comments related to Ferret under the Mac operating system are welcome of course.

Thank you,
Ansley