The emulator will initially appear with an empty black screen (#1). Wait until the emulator is ready, with a colored screen background (#2). Even after the background appears, you should wait until the emulated phone has finished preparing its SD card: there will be a notice at the top of the phone screen while the card is being prepared.
Install App Inventor Software. (starting App Inventor) and Step 4 (setting up your device or emulator). Instructions for Mac OS X.
![Inventor Inventor](http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/sites/all/files/SetupAI2/USB.png)
When connected, the emulator will launch and show the app you have open in App Inventor. If this is the first time you are using the emulator after installing the App Inventor Setup software, you will see a message asking you to update the emulator. Follow the directions on the screen to perform the update and reconnect the emulator. You will need to do this kind of update whenever there is a new version of the App Inventor software. For problems with aiStarter, or if the Emulator does not connect, for information about what might be wrong.
Firstly sorry if this place does not deal with questions like this, I have tried the tutorials online for App Inventor and I cannot seem to find anything relevant. Basically I am downloading App Inventor 2 which has given me no issues, however when I try and connect to the emulator it fails. It states that 'Your companion is out of date', the tutorials online told me for this I would have to download the latest software (which I already had but I uninstalled and tried again). After getting the same response a few times I managed to get through to another screen that stated 'Unable to send update through to device/emulator' and on the actual emulator it just states 'Parse error - There is a problem parsing the package' Does anyone know what is happening here?