[Engineering issue] Could you finally revamp and improve the builds of the Affinity products ?

[emfx]

Hi lead build engineer,

Affinity products are compiled very poorly, I am sorry but this is sadly true.

1)

There is a huge redundancy in the binaries, leading to excessive application size on disk.
The app could be more than 2 times lighter If your engineers were spending time of fixing this ridiculous issue. (there is multiple times the same core packaged in the build for different colorspaces !!)

2)

A note for the mac apps, you ship them with both Apple Silicon AND x86 binaries, leading to 1 additional GB of DEAD data wasting our disks.
Your users are NOT dumb, they know if they use an Apple silicon M1 mac or an Intel one! Stop thinking we are stupid and stop wasting our very limited apple SSDs, and please provide two packages so we stop this NONSENSE.

 

If you really care as much as you pretend you do, by fixing those 2 huge issues, next week the app size will shrink drastically.

Thanks for caring for real.

[loukash]

eclecticlight.co/2020/07/30/instant-weight-loss-how-to-strip-universal-apps

Try at your own risk…

[emfx]

Thanks for the tips

I expect staff to take their responsibility though.

Not rely on shady tools.

[loukash]

For what it’s worth, Publisher 1.9 is significantly slimmer than 1.8.6. Not sure if that’s a "good thing" though, see all the bug reports. (Haven’t downloaded APh and AD yet)

In any case, after toying with it for the best part of yesterday, I have downgraded the complete suite to 1.8.4 until Serif finally gets their act together. 

Also a tool to consider: Monolingual 

I don’t need any localizations but English, German and Czech. Stripping the rest removes over 100 MB from each Affinity app.

[Fixx]

2) I think Apple recommends (requires?) releasing mac software as universal app with intel and M1 code both included. Serif is doing here as Apple says.

[fde101]

On 2/7/2021 at 3:36 AM, Fixx said:

2) I think Apple recommends (requires?) releasing mac software as universal app with intel and M1 code both included. Serif is doing here as Apple says.

Not sure that it is required but it will certainly be the norm for a while.

It was with the transition from PowerPC to Intel as well.

[emfx]

When powerpc and macintel were in transition, I remembrer many programs offering architecture options.

And here, we are talking about "professional" softwares, hence the need of professional customer treatment.

If Serif HAVE TO ship a universal binary version, fine! But then offer a intel only version and a arm only version too for those who know what damn mac they bought..... (like.... 99.95 percent of us...)

[Old Bruce]

37 minutes ago, emfx said:

When powerpc and macintel were in transition, I remembrer many programs offering architecture options.

 

Can't remember how the change to PowerPC was handled, I think all the old 68k software just continued working. And stuff was still being coded in Pascal back then....

[loukash]

2 hours ago, emfx said:

those who know what damn mac they bought..... (like.... 99.95 percent of us...)

I wouldn't bet a dime on that…

[v_kyr]

Damn, I can't remember the name of the NeXTstep/OpenStep frontend tool we had in past times for stripping fat binaries (which usually did what cmdline tools like lipo, ditto, strip perform) here. - It wasn't like this poor Mac(ish) one ...

... we had something much cooler in past times, which showed GUI based all in an distributed fat bin app provided architectures (NIHS) and allowed to select which of those architectures (including all relevant bins and libs etc.) to strip out safely then. AFAI vagely remember it might have too been a fronted app, but a pretty good and safe operating one. Even can't remember if it was something NeXT supplied or some third party app, arghh. 😟