How To Install alwaysAI on a Mac
by Taiga Ishida | Apr 30, 2020 | Computer Vision | 4 minute read
The process of developing computer vision applications has been greatly simplified by alwaysAI, which now includes native support for Mac OSX (Mojave and Catalina), and enables developers to get started prototyping applications right away with very little setup required.
Using the convenient starter apps provided by alwaysAI allows developers to build computer vision applications such as object detection on a local machine (which can be easily deployed on any edge device using the alwaysAI CLI) so that less time is spent sourcing and provisioning devices upfront, and more time is spent creating applications and making a real impact as quickly as possible.
If you haven't already, you can create your alwaysAI account here.
Here’s how to install the alwaysAI environment on your Mac:
Start by navigating to the docs section of our website and look for Development Computer Setup:
Choose your operating system (Catalina or Mojave) and download. If you have not already created an alwaysAI account, you can do that here.
The alwaysAI Mac installer is not signed by Apple and will prompt an “unidentified developer” warning. Follow the directions below to install it.
Once the installer is downloaded, Mac users should ctrl-click to show the package in their finder:
Then ctrl-click the package file and choose Open:
From here you will get the following security warning. Choose Open to install:
After opening the package, you will be taken through install steps as follows:
The install summary screen includes important instructions for users who have previously installed the alwaysAI CLI via NPM:
At this point it is a good idea to open a terminal window and type` aai -v` to verify the alwaysAI CLI is installed and available. At any time you can check CLI options and syntax by typing `aai`. Most of the CLI commands are interactive as well.
And with that, you’re ready to go!
Next, we will grab an alwaysAI starter application and run it to verify everything is in working order. Go back to the docs and choose the Hello World project:
You should see a wizard that will walk you through the steps to download and run a Hello World object detector. Each step includes code you can copy and then paste into a bash command line editor. Step one is to get the starter applications:
The starter applications will be downloaded into a subdirectory (`always-starter-apps`):
This directory will include not just Hello World, but many other starter applications as well. Real-time applications will use either your Mac’s built-in camera or a webcam by default. All others, including Hello World, take a set of images that will have been downloaded with the starter application. See the alwaysAI docs for instructions on changing data sources.
From here you will install the machine learning model Hello World uses and then run the application:
Note the commands to install are very slightly different if you’re working with an edge device. But since you’ll be running first on your Mac, follow the directions for Development Computer.
After running `aai app install` at the command line you should see:
And then `aai app start` to execute the application:
The CLI will give you a URL (highlighted here) where you can see the application running. Just paste it into a browser window to invoke the alwaysAI streamer:
That will conclude your Mac set up!
For additional setup information and help, return to the Development Computer Setup page in the alwaysAI docs.
RELATED: Learn how to create and run an object detector starter app in minutes
