Lion support arrives for older color management solutions

Mac OS X Lion's orphaning of the Rosetta PowerPC emulation technology has put many users' workflows in a bind. Popular but older versions of programs, such as Quicken for Macintosh, wouldn't work under Lion. Some developers decided against providing backwards support for older hardware devices such as printers or scanners, directing customers to newer, compatible packages, while some upgrades have arrived slowly. This has been true for color calibration calibration packages.

X-Rite announced a number of software upgrades in December right before the holidays, including the i1Profiler D2 Lion Edition, which supports its i1Display LT and i1Display 2 display-calibration  packages. These are currently "retired devices," and are compatible with the company's i1Match software. Of course, the company was pushing users to upgrade to newer and already Lion-compatible i1Display Pro and ColorMunki Display.

Here is the page with the complete list of Lion compatibility for X-Rite color solutions.

On the same subject, there is an interesting page on the Color Wiki site about Lion compatibility, called the Mac OS X Lion Color Management Migration Tool. It's not a software tool per se, but a list of color management software and hardware packages and their compatibility. It's very useful.

If you are concerned with the compatibility of Mac apps other than color calibration, check out the Roaring Apps list.

Note: Anyone dealing with profiles will quickly encounter one of the great annoyances with Mac OS X Lion: the default hiding of the Library folder in the Go menu item, the very place for finding application settings files. To show the Library folder, hold down the Option key while clicking on the Go menu item.