Trouble launching OpenSesame on Mac OS El Capitan

ethanweed

I know there have been several posts about troubles installing and launching OpenSesame on Mac, but I haven't found anybody in the form having the same issue I am.

I am teaching a group of students, and most of them have installed OS without trouble. But I have two students who have installed OS on macs running MacOS 10.11.6 (El Capitan). For these students, the installation seems to go fine, but OS crashes on launch: The icon bounces as if opening, but then nothing happens.

I have installed OS myself on a mac, with no issues. The students have gone through the routine of giving the app permission to open even though it is not downloaded from the app store, so that isn't the problem.

I have checked to see if the path to the installed app contains any "odd" characters "ø", "å", etc., that might be giving Python trouble, but there is nothing unusual there.

Any ideas what else to try?

Kind regards,

Ethan

ethanweed

As further information on this problem, when the student opens OpenSesame, and then uses ActivityMonitor to look at currently running processes, OpenSesame does not appear, despite the fact that the icon has "bounced" as if launching.

sebastiaan

@ethanweed The best way to see what goes wrong is probably by launching OpenSesame through a terminal (so you can see the error message, if any), but I don't have a Mac myself to give you detailed instructions on how to do this. @Daniel How does that work again?

ethanweed

Since her operating system is from 2015, I tried asking her to install an older version of OpenSesame (version 3.1.3) and that actually worked, so... at least for the time being all is well, as long as she doesn't need any of the newer features. But I would still like to know the terminal commands for seeing startup error messages; it would be nice to see why she can't use the most recent version.

Daniel

Hi @ethanweed

If the OpenSesame app is located in the /Applications folder then you can fire it up with

/Applications/OpenSesame.app/Contents/MacOS/OpenSesame

Alternatively, you can ask the students to run OpenSesame from source, see https://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.3/dev/fromsource/

ethanweed

Great, thanks - much appreciated!

/Ethan