Proposal Development and Submission

Grants.gov for Macintosh Users

The grants.gov process is not particularly friendly to users of the Apple Macintosh, of Unix and Linux machines, and of other non-Windows machines. The vendors of the relevant software, PureEdge Viewer (now owned by IBM) are working on a platform-neutral version of the viewer, however they have only a pre-release version available for testing, and have not indicated when they expect the final product to be ready.

Grants.gov has made a number of suggestions for users of the Macintosh.

Before spending effort on any of the options below, you should ask yourself how much use of PureEdge you need to make. If you are a PI who is comfortable having your administrator compile your application for you (and assuming they have access to a Windows machine) you may want to avoid using PureEdge altogether. The technical/programmatic portion of a proposal can still be prepared in the usual way (using Word, LaTeX, or whatever system you’re familiar with, and is acceptable to the agency). It’s only when the parts of the proposal have to be combined, and the budget data entered into the forms, that PureEdge comes into play.

With that in mind, these are currently the options for Mac users to access PureEdge:

  1. Use the USITE computing clusters. PureEdge Viewer has been installed on all the PCs in NSIT's USITE computing clusters. These are available for use by any member of the University community, and are located in Crerar, Harper, and Regenstein libraries, and in the Biological Sciences Learning Center.

    For details of opening hours, please see the USITE website.

  2. Run Microsoft VirtualPC on your Mac (This option is not available on the newer, Intel-based Macs). VirtualPC allows you to run a copy of Windows within a window on your MacOS desktop. Within Windows, it is then possible to run PureEdge Viewer. You may also want to install applications such as Adobe Reader, and Microsoft Office. Note that this requires a lot of memory installed on your computer. The minimum requirement for Virtual PC is 512 MB.

    VirtualPC is licensed under our Microsoft Campus Agreement, and installation disks are available to departments from the Campus Computer Store, for $25. You will also need a licensed copy of Windows, and this is also available to departments from the computer store.

    For those of you using newer Macs based on Intel processors, Virtual PC is not available. There are some other products you may wish to try (Apple's Boot Camp, or Parallel's Desktop for Mac). However, we have no experience with these products and cannot recommend them.

  3. Use the NIH/grants.gov’s Citrix server. The NIH has provided a Windows server that is suitable for preparing applications in PureEdge. (It is available for submissions to all agencies, not just NIH). By downloading a piece of software to your Mac (the Citrix client), it is possible to connect to the server, and run PureEdge on their Windows machine. Like Virtual PC, this creates a window on your Mac inside which Windows is running. Unlike Virtual PC, Windows is actually running on a server at the NIH.

    We have seen a number of problems with this solution (we don’t know how robust it is; the server does not have Acrobat installed, making it difficult to review your attachments; the timeout period seems to be very short). As a result we don’t recommend this option to anybody who isn’t able to prepare their proposal especially early, or who doesn’t have a backup plan.

You can more about grants.gov’s plans for Mac users, and instructions for using Virtual PC or Citrix at http://www.grants.gov/MacSupport.

University Research Administration and NSIT are looking into other ways to provide aid to Mac users on campus. In the meantime the best recommendation we can make is that you arrange where possible to have your administrator assemble your application.
squares