title: How to use a framework build of Python with Anaconda
body: <p>I'm unable to get matplotlib animations to display on a Mac computer.  I've chased down several attempts at installing ffmpeg but they've all failed and I'm starting to wonder if that isn't the wrong way to solve the problem.</p>
  
  <p>I found <a href="http://matplotlib.org/faq/osx_framework.html" rel="noreferrer">this</a> page. </p>
  
  <p>Since I'm running Python from the Spyder app in Anaconda, the section for this seems relevant.  It says </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The default python provided in (Ana)Conda is not a framework build.
    However, the Conda developers have made it easy to install a framework
    build in both the main environment and in Conda envs. To use this
    install python.app <code>conda install python.app</code> and use <code>pythonw</code> rather
    than <code>python</code></p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I'm not perfectly clear on what this means, but I opened a terminal, ran <code>conda install python.app</code> and it seemed to work--at least there were no error messages.  I could navigate to a folder that contained the file <code>python.app</code>.  </p>
  
  <p>I'm not clear on what it means to "use <code>pythonw</code>" but I navigated to the animation I'm trying to compile and ran <code>$ pythonw anim.py</code> and it gave me an I/O error.  I'm not sure if I'm supposed to use <code>pythonw</code> in some other way, or what.  If I restart and try to run the code in Spyder I get the same error as before.</p>
  
  <p>I know that the code works, because I've run it on a Linux machine that has ffmpeg and it worked.</p>
  
  <p>Is there something else I need to do to get a framework build, whatever that means?</p>