FEEDBACK: Wondering why the app size of Affinity products is just so unreasonable!

[CTKJOSE]

Affinity Designer 2 is a 2.67 GB monster in which all that space is pretty much taken up by its frameworks in particular "liblibpersona.dylib".

I like Affinity but why so bulky? as a matter fact the part that I hate the most about Affinity products and really only use when forced to are its "personas".  The export persona adds just so much extra steps I always curse at it, and the pixel persona sits there never used.

 

[loukash]

6 hours ago, CTKJOSE said:

why so bulky?

Because each app contains all the "1st persona" functionality of the other two apps. That is why you can seamlessly open documents and add features from APh and APu in ADe (and vice versa), and why APu's StudioLink feature works in the first place. 

6 hours ago, CTKJOSE said:

the pixel persona sits there never used

Many users are happy about the Pixel persona because that makes Designer the most universal of the Affinity trinity, and a great starting point for beginners and design hobbyists: it is focused on vector design, but it also has lots of Publisher's typography features and it can do basic pixel editing without the need to buy Photo or other bitmap editor.

[fde101]

While the Affinity apps do seem rather large for what they are, consider that QuarkXPress does not have the multiple personas and still manages to be even larger at 2.8 GB; there are numerous other applications on my system which are nearly as large, and a few which are much larger still: Xojo (development tool) is over 3 GB, Davinci Resolve is over 3.7 GB... some of these are large because they include a lot of libraries and code that is redundant with what is already available from the underlying operating system, but instead of leveraging what is already provided, they roll their own solutions (or use 3rd-party libraries) in order to be "cross-platform" and reduce the differences between the various operating systems they support; yet even without the need for cross-platform code, the very Mac-specific Final Cut Pro is still over 4 GB.

Additionally, even though some applications may seem smaller if you look only at the application itself, they actually consist of more than just the application bundle - Cubase Pro for example is just under 1.2 GB if you are only looking at the application bundle, but it installs more than just that bundle - it also includes several additional smaller applications and a great deal of content; when you add it all together the supporting files outside the application bundle are a fair bit larger than the application itself.  I used Cubase as an example, but this is true of many other applications also.

And don't even get me started on video games and other similar applications - I have a flight simulator installed which comes with so much content (scenery, etc.) that the install consumes over 60 GB.

One nice thing they managed to pull off with the v2 Affinity applications is that at least the installed content downloaded from the Serif user account is now apparently shared among the apps, so you can download brushes and the like once from the Account window within one of the applications and the other two both see them.  It may be a relatively small concession, but at least it is something.

Also, possibly the only advantage the Windows version has over the Mac version, is that Windows does de-duplication of identical files across applications that are installed from MSIX packages, so if you are using the MSIX packages to install under Windows, those files that are in common among the applications should only take up disk space once even though all three applications contain those same files.  I don't believe this will happen for the other installer formats, however, and as many people are asking for those, they will not likely benefit from this feature.

[walt.farrell]

8 hours ago, CTKJOSE said:

Affinity Designer 2 is a 2.67 GB monster in which all that space is pretty much taken up by its frameworks in particular "liblibpersona.dylib".

What OS are you talking about?

If you're on a Mac, then the code is present for both Intel- and Apple-based Macs.

[Twolane]

I'm sorry, but the apps are too big? I could be wrong, but I'm certain someone will be along shortly to suggest that the apps are too small. So... ???

[fde101]

35 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If you're on a Mac, then the code is present for both Intel- and Apple-based Macs.

This is also a good point.

The .dylib extension is somewhat unique to macOS, so presumably he is on the Mac.

There are utilities that can be used to strip out the Intel code from the universal binary, but I am not sure how doing so might impact updates, so if you do this and there is some impact as a result, you might wind up needing to redownload the entire app when an update is released:

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

 

My own solution is to have large enough drives and to organize things in such a way that this does not become a problem.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

There are utilities that can be used to strip out the Intel code from the universal binary, but I am not sure how doing so might impact updates

While I'm not stripping platform binaries, I've always been removing unneeded languages with Monolingual on Mac.
On Affinity, this will remove quite a few dozens of MB from each app. Be aware though that if you need "English (United States)" in Affinity, you must not remove "English (United States, Computer)" in Monolingual. For some reason, on my configuration it would delete the "en-US.lproj" bundle.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

My own solution is to have large enough drives

One reason why they will pry my mid-2012 MacBook Pro from my cold, dead hands is that I can always replace the internal drive with an even larger and faster SSD. Doing fine with 2TB for the time being. But since I also partially work in the multitrack audio recording and mixing métier, it fills up fast.

[fde101]

2 hours ago, loukash said:

I can always replace the internal drive with an even larger and faster SSD.

The one thing I upgraded when I ordered my Mac Studio from the base M1 Ultra configuration was the SSD - I went to 2 TB internally - and after less than a year of mostly just installing applications on it and smaller amounts of data, it is already over half full.

This is in spite of an external disk array with four 4 TB hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration, giving me 12 TB of usable space externally, which currently has over 3.7 TB on it.

I am a bit of a pack rat both physically and digitally, but the fact that I am primarily on a desktop rather than a portable setup means that I can deal with this by storing most of the big stuff on an external array.

[loukash]

47 minutes ago, fde101 said:

12 TB of usable space externally

Oh, I'm lucky in that regard: My late dad who died two years ago was – among others – literally obsessed with recording countless movies and series from his digital cable TV. And so I inherited a collection of over 40 external hard drives with a total of whopping 90 TB storage space – as cataloged thanks to NeoFinder. Still working on it to actually sort it all out, haha…

[fde101]

4 hours ago, loukash said:

over 40 external hard drives

One thing to be careful about in case you were not aware: hard drives were not designed to maintain their data for a long period of time while not being used.  The data is stored magnetically but it deteriorates over time if not "refreshed" periodically, which the drive does behind the scenes while it is plugged in and working.  If the drive sits disconnected for a long time the data can deteriorate to the point of becoming corrupt.

A hard drive by itself is not a good backup or long-term storage solution.

If you plan on storing that information long-term without spending a bundle for internet storage/backup, you might want to look into "M Disc" technology.

[loukash]

1 minute ago, fde101 said:

A hard drive by itself is not a good backup or long-term storage solution.

You're preaching to the preacher but thanks anyway.  
Aaand we're getting slightly off topic.

So in short, I don't maintain one backup, two backups or even three backups, I think in total I have at least five, no, six regular backup strategies that involve hourly Time Machine on Time Capsule, periodic DVD-R backups of changed files in my Home folder (via an automated daily routine to a local 4.7 GB disk image until it's full and can be burned to disc), a bootable 2TB clone of all MacBook Pro volumes (Mountain Lion, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina), my even older MacBook Pro with synced El Capitan volume, a bootable clone of the latter, a Time Machine USB disk of the latter, a bunch of disks with old Time Machine backups, piles of CD-R and DVD-R backups from the past 20+ years (some of the early ones might start to deteriorate soon, d'oh). Etc. Oh, and a PowerBook G4 with yet another (ir)regularly synced clone of my Documents folder.
Call me paranoid, but I haven't lost a single file in at least 25 years. The worst loss may have been HD failure in my MacBook one week after I bought the Time Capsule 10 years ago. Went out to buy a new HD, reloaded the Time Machine backup over night, and the next morning I was up and running with less than one hour loss of work.

Highly recomended tools for a backup strategy on Mac:

• ChronoSync (user since 2003, the most flexible backup tool I've ever seen)
• NeoFinder/CDFinder (user since 2000, with about 1900 catalog items: you want to know where your stuff is, right?)
• SuperDuper (needed before ChronoSync learned how to create bootable backups, but still rock solid)
• ChronoAgent (from the ChronoSync makers: ultrafast LAN connection to bypass the slow AFP/SMB filesharing)
• Yeah, and Time Machine. Usually it just works. Every now and then, like every two three years, the periodic verification may return an error and block further backups. In that case, copy the existing sparse disk image to yet another external backup drive (as it's usually still readable), reformat the internal Time Capsule disk and start over again…

Back up, back up, back up!™

~~~

So yes, rather sooner than later I'll need to go through my late dad's HDs to collect all data I want to keep. He was an avid photographer as well. Many of the disks are actually backups, or backups of backups. He didn't have a strategy for backing up, he would just randomly copy folders from his PCs. It's a quite mess.

[loukash]

46 minutes ago, fde101 said:

you might want to look into "M Disc" technology

Interesting!
Usually I used to buy Verbatim Gold Archival Grade DVD-R, but they don't seem to be available lately.
Will look into it, thanks.

[CTKJOSE]

Just for the record, I don't hate AfD, in the contrary I have bought many of the popular vector drawing apps in the Apple Store, (Amadine and Graphic are the only ones I will recommend beside AfD, Graphic is not getting updated) and AfD is still my workhorse.

I understand the nature of AfD, they are cross platform, tons of features, and they stand their ground to "professional apps" on their own.  

I don't mean to compare but in contrast Amadine is a Mac Universal app with 56.1 MB, its strictly vector, is getting frequent updates, has some nifty/unique features, still has some quirks and bugs that need to be iron out, but as a developer  it is an affordable app that checks all of my boxes in a fraction of the size.

I have a MacBook (2019) with one 1TB that's my on the go workhorse, between Xcode, Node, (I also have two versions of Xojo), multiple apps and code repositories, Im on a squeeze, even with three external SSD (mainly for code/files) that go in my backpack with my MacBook, and not to mention a 4TB brick that sits at my home. I find myself budgeting my space quite often!