No Python Under Library Mac

In this Rocket Yard guide, we’re going to take a look at the Photos app included with macOS Catalina. What’s New in Photos. The new features in Photos run the gamut from minor tweaks to the user interface to the use of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that concentrates on data analysis to build analytical models.The models allow the Photos app to identify patterns.

Introduction

We are pleased to introduce the first Python library to fully enable GUI testing of Mac applications via the Apple Accessibility API. This library was created out of desperation. Existing tools such as using appscript to send messages to accessibility objects are painful to write and slow to use. ATOMac has direct access to the API. It's fast and easy to use to write tests.

Getting started

ATOMac requires a system running OS X and Xcode installed. It has been tested extensively on 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8. 10.5 may work. If you experience issues with ATOMac on a particular version of OS X, please open a ticket in the issue tracker.

Systemwide accessibility must be enabled. Check the checkbox: System Preferences > Universal Access > Enable access for assistive devices. Failure to enable this will result in ErrorAPIDisabled exceptions during some module usage.

Installation should be as simple as running the following command line, which will download, build and install ATOMac:

Usage

Once the atomac module is installed, you should be able to use it to launch an application:

This should launch Automator. Next, get a reference to the UI Element for the application itself:

Now, we can find objects in the accessibility hierarchy:

Note that we retrieved an accessibility attribute from the Window object - AXTitle. ATOMac supports reading and writing of most attributes. Using Xcode's included accessibility inspector can provide a quick way to find these attributes.

There is a shortcut for getting the sheet object which bypasses accessing it through the Window object - ATOMac can search all objects in the hierarchy:

There are search methods for most types of accessibility objects. Each search method, such as windows, has a corresponding recursive search function, such as windowsR. The recursive search finds items that aren't just direct children, but children of children. These search methods can be given terms to identify specific elements. Note that * and ? can be used as wildcard match characters in all ATOMac search methods:

ATOMac has a method to search for UI Elements that match any number of criteria. The criteria are accessibility attributes:

FindFirst and FindFirstR return the first item found to match the criteria or None. FindAll and FindAllR return a list of all items that match the criteria or an empty list.

Objects are fairly versatile. You can get a list of supported attributes and actions on an object:

Performing an action is as natural as:

Any action can be triggered this way.

LDTP

Starting with version 1.0.0, ATOMac now includes compatibility with LDTP, a cross platform automation library. This allows testers to write a single script that will automate test cases on Linux, Windows, and now Mac OS X. Information and documentation on LDTP can be found at the LDTP home page.

LDTP operation is virtually identical to the operation on Linux. The import mechanism is slightly different, since it is shipped with ATOMac. Cross platform scripts executing on the System Under Test should import the LDTP client as follows:

In the future, the LDTP client may be broken out into a separate platform independent module to ameliorate this issue.

Like the Linux platform, the LDTP daemon may be run on the SUT, enabling client/server testing by executing 'ldtp' at a shell prompt. See the LDTP documentation for more details on client/server operation.

Todo and contributing

Although ATOMac is fully functional and drives hundreds of automated test cases at VMware, we have a to-do list to make the project even better.

  • Formatting - this code is not currently PEP-8 compliant.
  • Better mouse handling - for example, a method to smoothly drag from one UI Element to another.
  • Cleanup the search methods - We could use currying to define all the search methods in AXClasses in a cleaner way.

Feel free to submit pull requests against the project on Github. If you're interested in developing ATOMac itself, sign up to the pyatom-dev mailing list.

See also

  • The ATOMac home page
  • Source code on Github

License

ATOMac is released under the GNU General Public License. See COPYING.txt for more details.

Authors

James Tatum <jtatum@gmail.com>,Andrew Wu,Jesse Mendonca,Ken Song,Nagappan Alagappan,Yingjun Li,

And other contributors listed in the CHANGELOG file. Thank you so much!

Author

Bob Savage <bobsavage@mac.com>

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.

The Mac-specific modules are documented in Mac OS X specific services.

Python on Mac OS 9 or earlier can be quite different from Python on Unix orWindows, but is beyond the scope of this manual, as that platform is no longersupported, starting with Python 2.4. See http://www.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython forinstallers for the latest 2.3 release for Mac OS 9 and related documentation.

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 from the Python website(https://www.python.org). A current “universal binary” build of Python, whichruns natively on the Mac’s new Intel and legacy PPC CPU’s, is available there.

What you get after installing is a number of things:

  • A MacPython2.7 folder in your Applications folder. In hereyou find IDLE, the development environment that is a standard part of officialPython distributions; PythonLauncher, which handles double-clicking Pythonscripts from the Finder; and the “Build Applet” tool, which allows you topackage Python scripts as standalone applications on your system.

  • 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¶

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.org) 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 2.7, you can use either python or pythonw.

4.1.3. Configuration¶

Python on OS X honors all standard Unix environment variables such asPYTHONPATH, 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.

No Python Under Library Machines

4.2. The IDE¶

No Python Under Library Mac

MacPython ships with the standard IDLE development environment. A goodintroduction to using IDLE can be found athttps://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/idle_intro/index.html.

4.3. Installing Additional Python Packages¶

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://pythonhosted.org/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 http://www.wxpython.org.

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 “Build Applet” tool that is placed in the MacPython 2.7 folder is fine forpackaging small Python scripts on your own machine to run as a standard Macapplication. This tool, however, is not robust enough to distribute Pythonapplications to other users.

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¶

Run Python On Mac

The MacPython mailing list is an excellent support resource for Python users anddevelopers on the Mac:

No Python Folder In Library Mac

Another useful resource is the MacPython wiki: