XTension does not come with or require an installer.

XTension requires at least OSX 10.4 on PPC or Intel (universal binary) but 10.5 or later is recommended. (As of this writing XTension will still run on 10.3.9 but this is now an unsupported installation and the support will be going away for real by the end of 2010.) It will also run fine on 10.6 but the USB devices seem to only work when running the 32bit kernel at the moment. NOTE: a bug in 10.6 detailed here http://db.tidbits.com/article/10643 may cause problems for XTension and other scriptable OSX apps under 10.6. After reading that I cannot recommend that you update to 10.6 until that is fixed by Apple.

XTension does not like to live in the Applications folder. Please put XTension inside a folder either inside of the applications folder or elsewhere as makes sense to you. XTension creates (be default) it's database and other support files and logs in the same folder it is running from, so to place it in the Applications folder makes a mess there. But creating a folder for it inside the applications folder and placing it in that is just fine.

XTension requires that you run as a user that has admin privileges on the machine. The “allow user to administer this machine” checkbox in the user info preference must be turned on. You must also keep that user logged in though it is OK to let the screen saver lock.

If you want to actually connect to something you'll need to have a supported interface. This is not required for experimenting with the demo database though or for just getting familiar with the app.

If you plan to ever use a USB device please select the “install USB device support” menu from the File menu. This just installs drivers for them so XTension can connect to them and wont hurt if you never use them. After some major system updates it may be necessary to re-install these so instead of hide them as part of a larger install process they are just part of the app.

If you plan to use any serial devices that will require a USB/Serial adaptor please have a look at the USB Serial Adaptor page.