Udemy is an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 130,000 courses and 35 million students. Learn programming, marketing, data science and more. If you're using OS X El Capitan v10.11.5 or later and your App Store preferences or Software Update preferences are set to download new updates when available, macOS Big Sur will be downloaded conveniently in the background, making it even easier to upgrade. A notification will inform you when macOS Big Sur is ready to be installed.
Apple began phasing in the use of its SSD-friendly APFS file system with High Sierra for SSD-only Macs, and then upgraded Fusion Drive-based Macs in Mojave. In Big Sur, Time Machine volumes can finally be formatted with APFS, too. But in this transition, one capability was quietly lost: APFS volumes cannot be shared for network access via Apple’s relatively ancient Apple Filing Protocol (AFP).
AFP dates to the pre-OS X days, with a version appearing in System 6 in the late 1980s. As with most older protocols, it got long in the tooth, and Apple went from just supporting the Windows and Linux world’s SMB to shifting to it as the only built-in sharing method. Way back in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple began moving away from AFP in favor of the industry-standard SMB, although it still hasn’t removed support.
In Big Sur, Apple dropped the ability to share volumes via AFP entirely, but even though Catalina retained AFP-sharing support, as noted above, APFS-formatted volumes could not be shared over AFP. macOS Sierra though Catalina “fails silently” in this method, letting you turn on AFP in the Sharing preference pane’s File Sharing section, even if there are no volumes that AFP can share. (Big Sur can still mount AFP-shared volumes.)
I suggest disabling AFP sharing on any Mac running Catalina or earlier versions that you no longer have HFS+ drives mounted or plan to mount in the future:
- Open the Sharing preference pane.
- Click the File Sharing item at left.
- Click the Options button.
- If you see an option for AFP, uncheck it. Check “Share filse and folders using SMB” if it isn’t selected.
- Click Done.
The only reason this typically matters, however, is on other Macs. When you have a stored alias on one Mac that points to another, and which was a connection originally made over AFP. The alias will still try to work if the other computer is sharing via AFP, even if the volume is no longer shared over AFP.
The solution?
- Delete your alias.
- In the Finder, choose Go > Network.
- Double-click the computer you want to share from.
- Enter login information for that Mac if prompted. (If may be stored in your Keychain and the login handled silently.)
- Double-click the volume you want to link to.
- Select the volume. See below for methods.
- Choose File > Make Alias or hold down Command and Option while dragging to create an alias.
You can select the volume in step 6 in one of several ways:
- In the Locations section of the sidebar, click the remote Mac, then in the resulting Finder window, double-click the volume you want to make an alias from. Navigate up one level and proceed to step 7.
- In Finder > Preferences, make sure that in the General tab you have selected “Connected servers.” This will make any mounted drives appear on the Desktop, where you can select them in step 6 and proceed to step 7.
This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Gabriel.
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Python on a Macintosh running Mac OS X is in principle very similar to Python onany other Unix platform, but there are a number of additional features such asthe IDE and the Package Manager that are worth pointing out.
4.1. Getting and Installing MacPython¶
Mac OS X 10.8 comes with Python 2.7 pre-installed by Apple. If you wish, youare invited to install the most recent version of Python 3 from the Pythonwebsite (https://www.python.org). A current “universal binary” build of Python,which runs natively on the Mac’s new Intel and legacy PPC CPU’s, is availablethere.
What you get after installing is a number of things:
- A
Python3.9
folder in yourApplications
folder. In hereyou find IDLE, the development environment that is a standard part of officialPython distributions; and PythonLauncher, which handles double-clicking Pythonscripts from the Finder. - A framework
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework
, which includes thePython executable and libraries. The installer adds this location to your shellpath. To uninstall MacPython, you can simply remove these three things. Asymlink to the Python executable is placed in /usr/local/bin/.
The Apple-provided build of Python is installed in
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework
and /usr/bin/python
,respectively. You should never modify or delete these, as they areApple-controlled and are used by Apple- or third-party software. Remember thatif you choose to install a newer Python version from python.org, you will havetwo different but functional Python installations on your computer, so it willbe important that your paths and usages are consistent with what you want to do.IDLE includes a help menu that allows you to access Python documentation. If youare completely new to Python you should start reading the tutorial introductionin that document.
If you are familiar with Python on other Unix platforms you should read thesection on running Python scripts from the Unix shell.
4.1.1. How to run a Python script¶
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Your best way to get started with Python on Mac OS X is through the IDLEintegrated development environment, see section The IDE and use the Help menuwhen the IDE is running.
If you want to run Python scripts from the Terminal window command line or fromthe Finder you first need an editor to create your script. Mac OS X comes with anumber of standard Unix command line editors, vim andemacs among them. If you want a more Mac-like editor,BBEdit or TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software (seehttp://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.html) are good choices, as isTextMate (see https://macromates.com/). Other editors includeGvim (http://macvim-dev.github.io/macvim/) and Aquamacs(http://aquamacs.org/).
To run your script from the Terminal window you must make sure that
/usr/local/bin
is in your shell search path.To run your script from the Finder you have two options:
- Drag it to PythonLauncher
- Select PythonLauncher as the default application to open yourscript (or any .py script) through the finder Info window and double-click it.PythonLauncher has various preferences to control how your script islaunched. Option-dragging allows you to change these for one invocation, or useits Preferences menu to change things globally.
4.1.2. Running scripts with a GUI¶
With older versions of Python, there is one Mac OS X quirk that you need to beaware of: programs that talk to the Aqua window manager (in other words,anything that has a GUI) need to be run in a special way. Use pythonwinstead of python to start such scripts.
With Python 3.9, you can use either python or pythonw.
4.1.3. Configuration¶
Python on OS X honors all standard Unix environment variables such as
PYTHONPATH
, but setting these variables for programs started from theFinder is non-standard as the Finder does not read your .profile
or.cshrc
at startup. You need to create a file~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
. See Apple’s Technical Document QA1067 fordetails.For more information on installation Python packages in MacPython, see sectionInstalling Additional Python Packages.
4.2. The IDE¶
MacPython ships with the standard IDLE development environment. A goodintroduction to using IDLE can be found athttp://www.hashcollision.org/hkn/python/idle_intro/index.html.
4.3. Installing Additional Python Packages¶
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There are several methods to install additional Python packages:
- Packages can be installed via the standard Python distutils mode (
pythonsetup.pyinstall
). - Many packages can also be installed via the setuptools extensionor pip wrapper, see https://pip.pypa.io/.
4.4. GUI Programming on the Mac¶
There are several options for building GUI applications on the Mac with Python.
PyObjC is a Python binding to Apple’s Objective-C/Cocoa framework, which isthe foundation of most modern Mac development. Information on PyObjC isavailable from https://pypi.org/project/pyobjc/.
The standard Python GUI toolkit is
tkinter
, based on the cross-platformTk toolkit (https://www.tcl.tk). An Aqua-native version of Tk is bundled with OSX by Apple, and the latest version can be downloaded and installed fromhttps://www.activestate.com; it can also be built from source.wxPython is another popular cross-platform GUI toolkit that runs natively onMac OS X. Packages and documentation are available from https://www.wxpython.org.
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PyQt is another popular cross-platform GUI toolkit that runs natively on MacOS X. More information can be found athttps://riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro.
4.5. Distributing Python Applications on the Mac¶
The standard tool for deploying standalone Python applications on the Mac ispy2app. More information on installing and using py2app can be foundat http://undefined.org/python/#py2app.
4.6. Other Resources¶
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The MacPython mailing list is an excellent support resource for Python users anddevelopers on the Mac:
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Another useful resource is the MacPython wiki: