Hi Betsy, Very sorry for the trouble and delay. I feel like my email signature should be "Sorry for the late reply. Zoom Meetings, Proposal Writing, and doom scrolling the NY Times Covid Page have prevented me from doing real work for the past year" On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 2:59 PM Swanner, Elizabeth S [GE AT] < eswanner@iastate.edu> wrote:

I use a Mac recently updated to Big Sur (11.6). I used the Binary Installer File for Larch and am a little stuck on what to do next. I was able to run the installer, and I have an xraylarch folder on my computer. However, I was hoping to use the XAS Viewer and do not see it within the folder. Should it be there? I had an old version of XAS Viewer I got while at APS but needed to replace that as it did not have all the modules. I did not check before removing that whether it was working on this OS.

It *should* be that there is a desktop folder called 'Larch' that has Apps in it, including for "XAS Viewer". There will also be a folder in your home directory called "xraylarch" with all the code in it. If you ran the installer but don't have the 'Larch' desktop folder, or if something went wrong, you should be able to open a Terminal and type ~/xraylarch/bin/larch -m at the prompt to make the Larch folder and mini-Apps to launch. If something goes wrong, that should report an error (if so, please send that!). With the Terminal open, you should also be able to type ~/xraylarch/bin/xas_viewer to launch XAS Viewer -- that's basically what the desktop app does. Again, if something goes wrong, that will report a readable error. (and if so, please send that!) There have been recent reports from others of broken installations because of problems with our use of the packages called "silx" and "numpy". These are fixed in the development branch, but I may need to push out a new version. I was hoping to finish some features, but maybe the fixes should be pushed out today or tomorrow.

I am also not clear how to use Larch in general (i.e., the Basic Larch GUI). Do I need to install python? I see there is a python application in the folder but when I try to open that nothing happens. I’m not sure if these are issues with my OS or if I am missing something really basic about how to launch Larch.

The intention is that you can use the XAS Viewer GUI and do not need to use the basic Larch GUI or Python unless you want to (and some people do!) or are going down the route of "okay, I really need to do some batch processing". The "HOME/xraylarch" folder includes a complete python + tools installation and will allow that. But, the GUIs should work! --Matt