Thursday, January 30, 2014

PEAKS 7 Viewer on Mac OS X Mavericks

I wrote a post in early 2013 here to help users to run PEAKS as a Viewer on Mac OS or Linux. Similar procedure applies to PEAKS 7 as well. Many thanks to user ceinwyn that brought the issue to me that PEAKS DB search results cannot be opened.

I spent some spare time looking into this issue and luckily found a workaround. Just want to re-state my disclaimer here.

Disclaimer: PEAKS does not officially support any OS other than Windows as of the time I am writing the post. The software may not be fully functional. Activating the software on OS X or Linux will consume the license, which means the same license can not be used again. I strongly recommend only following the steps to configure PEAKS Viewer (the unlicensed Studio) on OS X or Linux for PEAKS result sharing and presentation purposes.

Basically what happened here is that PEAKS 7 has some sizing issue with the Auqa look and feel from Apple Mac OS X. The workaround is to change the look and feel to a cross-platform one that Apple also support. To make things easier, I have put a modified version of the jar file here. And here are the steps:
  1. Check the version of PEAKS. Go to Help -> About PEAKS. In the dialog, you should see the build number, e.g. build 20131119. This build number must match the number in the downloaded jar file in the above link.
  2. Close PEAKS.
  3. Download the jar file and replace the peaksstudio.jar in the PEAKS directory with this one.
  4. Start PEAKS and now the PEAKS DB search results can be opened. 

Enjoy PEAKS and happy sharing!