Pantone Huey and Mac OS X Leopard

Hi All,

 

I just got a new iMac with OS X Leopard which I will use mainly for photo editing. To help calibrate the

screen I attached a Pantone Huey which worked fine under Windows on my old machine. In fact it still

works fine...the only problem is that the huey color management process doesn't start automatically when

I boot the Mac. I have to start Huey manually and then quit the application in order to get the the huey

icon in the menu bar at the top of the screen.

 

From the Activity Monitor it seems that the process that manages the Huey device is called hueyAmbient.

How do I include it in the startup sequence?

 

Many thanks in advance for helping someone new to the Mac world

 

Carsten

I don't know the Pantone Huey so I might not be much help.

In general if you want an application to start during startup, you just drag the application icon onto the dock and then right click on it and select 'execute on startup' or something (not in front of my Mac right now)

But that will only start the application automatically and you would still have to quit it each time.

 

So I am not sure how much that helps but I thought I give my 10 pence.

Carsten, this is the problem with Leopard which I have already reported to Pantone and

received no response to date.

 

Just to let you know, it did work fine under Tiger 10.4. The red icon is always there and

functions properly. When I upgraded to Leopard, what you have described is exactly

what's happening.

 

Of course Pantone has not officially supported Leopard so they are not liable for using it

under this new OS. So there is really no way to make it start up except to start the

application and then quit.

 

My question really about Pantone is that I don't mind really that they have not supported

Leopard since it just came out. But their specs currently show that the product supports

10.3 or higher. Second, Leopard was available to developers and they should have had an

advanced copy just like every other company who is really interested in taking the time to

develop for Leopard. Third, they have been mum about Leopard support unlike other

manufacturer websites that promise they are currently working on supporting the OS. On

their website and especially support page, there is no mention of this OS when I click

search. Fourth, I emailed them about Leopard support awhile back and still have no

response from them about anything.

 

In any case, despite their lousy customer support they will obviously bring out an update

just like they did with Windows Vista which could essentially bring the version software at

par with the PC side. The only question is when.

 

ColorVision Spyder3 Elite is out. The lower priced Sypder3 Pro will follow soon. It

supports Leopard. I've heard great customer support from that company. Maybe it's a

sign that Pantone is pushing us away. :P

Raymond,

 

makes you wonder what could possibly be so hard about changing the software so that a service that obviously does work gets started at login time...

 

Cheers

 

Casten

I have also had the same sort of trouble with Huey 1.0.4 under Mac OS 10.5 on both a G5 and

a MacBook Pro, and Huey Pro 1.5 software does not work at all. I have read reports of Huey

10.4 crashing Macs running 10.5 which is even worse. Pantone really needs to update their

software soon.

Sorry that should be "Huey 1.0.4 crashing Macs running 10.5".

OK I figured out a workaround for getting hueyAmbient to be included in the Start Up

programs of OS X 10.5 Leopard. If it is possible that Huey is causing crashes on your

machine, you probably should NOT do it.

 

But if you are just getting the annoying failure of the calibration to reactivate on restart

then this is one way to solve the Startup issue:

 

1) Find Huey program in your Applications folder.

2) Right click or control-click on the program and pick "Show Package Contents" in the

popup menu.

3) Open the folders "Contents," then "Resources," then "Support" and you will see

"hueyAmbient.app".

4) Make an alias to the desktop (or your hard drive or other place you can find it easily).

The easy way to make the alias is to start to drag hueyAmbient.app to the desktop then

hold down the option and command keys (Apple key on older Macs). This is like a Windows shortcut.

5) Open System Preferences, then Accounts and pick your user account. Click the lock and

enter your password.

6) Open the Login Items tab, then click on the plus sign beneath the list.

7) In the next dialog box navigate to your alias to hueyAmbient.app on the Desktop or

wherever you put it.

8) Confirm that hueyAmbient is added to the list of Login Items, and you should be good

to go until Pantone releases an update.

Hi again,<br><br>

 

I ran into a complication on my co-worker's MacPro, with the above alias method not

opening properly and giving an error that "the script could not be run, etc..." I fixed this by

using Applescript's Script Editor to write an mini-application to open hueyAmbient. You

can enter the following script in script editor:<br><br>

 

tell application "Finder"<br>

activate<br>

open application file "hueyAmbient.app" of folder "Support" of folder "Resources" of

folder "Contents" of application file "huey?.app" of folder "Applications" of startup

disk<br>

end tell<br><br>

 

 

Then use Save As to make the script an application, "run only" type. Finally go to your

System Preferences, Accounts, your user's Login Items, and add the little application you

made from the script.<br><br>

 

Once the Pantone elves fix the Huey software, delete files from either of these

workarounds.

 

If you have trouble with crashing or other programs misbehaving you may also want to try

disabling Huey 1.0.4 and these workarounds.

Steven,

 

thanks a lot! I just tried the 'alias method' (without creating an alias; you can just drag the hueyambient.app into the Login list. Works just fine.

 

 

Many thanks

 

Carsten

I'm surprised if the fix is this easy, why Pantone is still mum about even trying to support

Leopard. Unlike other companies, this silence is a turn-off to me as a current customer and

makes them look like a lazy company that doesn't even try to deliver.

 

In any case, thanks for the assistance in providing a work-around.

Another way to get the room light compensation item to startup on boot in Leopard is to set a login item to the Hueyambient app found in

~/Library/Application Support/huey. That may be just a bit easier than the method given above, which also works.

<p>Thank you for this thread! Steven K, you rock. For a while I thought my Huey on my Mac was working but then discovered that whenever I logged out, apparently it wasn't. I went searching and found this explanation! THANK YOU!</p>

<p>And surprisingly since this thread started back in 2007, Pantone still has not brought out a fix in 2009 despite acknowledging the issue as well as me pointing this thread to them.</p>

<p>Looks like they abandoned their own product.</p>

Its 2011 and I am still having the same problem. Pantone couldnt fix a problem for over 4 years. Shame on them.