Affinity downlod is 366 Megabytes

[William Overington]

I just tried to start Affinity Publisher and instead of it starting I have been offered a new beta version, version 1.7.0.273 and it is 366 Megabytes.

I remember when PCs were designed in a way such that it was thought that nobody would ever need more than 640 kilobytes of memory or something like that!

At present 16% of the beta has been downloaded and the estimate is for another 27 minutes 5 seconds are needed to be needed to complete the download.

I wonder if it will be possible to add an Author name into a PDF with the new version.

I wonder how large an Affinity Publisher download will be when the product is launched.

William

 

[Alfred]

“Affinity downlod”? “27 minutes 5 seconds are needed to be needed”? Hmm....

My ADSL connection, which I’ve always thought to be on the slow side, mostly manages to download at about 1 megabyte per second. So I would expect a 366 MB file to take about 6 minutes on my system.

I remember that my first IBM-compatible PC came with a 40 MB hard drive (twice the capacity of the HDD on the machine I was using at my place of work) and replacing the supplied HDD with a 100 MB one cost me about 100 GBP.

[William Overington]

Hello Alfred

Downloading has now just finished and a security scan is taking place and has now completed satisfactorily.

William

 

[William Overington]

My two posts above are 26 minutes apart.

William

 

 

[William Overington]

16 minutes ago, Alfred said:

“Affinity downlod”? “27 minutes 5 seconds are needed to be needed”? Hmm.... 

 

Ah, yes, spelling and what happened there! :-)

William

 

[fdelaneau]

Affinity Designer download is about 260 Mo and 1.2 Go once installed. Affinity Photo is about the same. Now Publisher is still in beta so my guess is there is some debugging code there that will be removed but it won't be significant.

As for your rant that it was better before, todays applications are vastly more complex and capable. Would you get back to applications from that era ?
That alone could justify the gain but there is also the fact that nowadays icon resources and images are also more common and bigger then before.

On macOS a simple application icon with all different states can weight more than 1Mo. If you open the app package you can see that the icons assets weights more than 250 Mo and there are thousands of them.

[GarryP]

To add a little to what fdelaneau said, beta software can also sometimes be in a larger package than then eventual commercial release because the developers haven't done any 'housekeeping' on it yet. (For example, old versions of stuff can be left hanging around just in case they're needed.)
The last Designer beta package I have is around 360MB while the package for 1.6.5.123 was around 245MB so I imagine the commercial Publisher package could be similarly smaller, perhaps.
The last download for the drivers of one of my graphics cards was over 560MB, so 366MB for an application with the functionality of Publisher doesn't sound too bad to me, in this day and age. At least we don't have to install it from floppy disks; that would take quite a bit longer than 26 minutes.

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Ah, yes, spelling and what happened there! :-)

I was hoping that you might look for something like this at the bottom of your post:

It might be a bit different on your laptop.

[Alfred]

4 minutes ago, GarryP said:

The last download for the drivers of one of my graphics cards was over 560MB

[carl123]

48 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I have been offered a new beta version, version 1.7.0.273

I thought the latest version was 1.7.0.270

 

[William Overington]

9 minutes ago, carl123 said:

I thought the latest version was 1.7.0.270

 

It appears that you thought correctly! Oh dear, I have got the jackpot for errors in this thread!

William

 

[William Overington]

29 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I was hoping that you might look for something like this at the bottom of your post:

It might be a bit different on your laptop.

I have those and I use Quote and Edit sometimes.

William

 

[William Overington]

37 minutes ago, fdelaneau said:

As for your rant that it was better before, todays applications are vastly more complex and capable.

Oh I was not ranting, I was just musing on how things have changed during the last thirty to forty years or so.

40 minutes ago, fdelaneau said:

 Would you get back to applications from that era ?

Well, generally speaking, no, but that was an era when programming languages were available and one could build applications quite straightforwardly.

For example, the availability of programming languages, often built-in to early microcomputers. Back in the 1990s there were programs such as Borland Turbo Pascal and Borland Turbo C.

I have tried more recently to get back into programming, but programming software seems to have gone very expensive, using it seems to be deemed to be a commercial activity and it costs a fortune.

For example, I would like to produce some software to demonstrate my research ideas. I am confident that I could write it if facilities like there were in the 1990s were available. I would want to read in a text file such as a Unicode Text Document that had been produced using WordPad and manipulate the characters and then output results.

William

 

[Alfred]

13 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I have tried more recently to get back into programming, but programming software seems to have gone very expensive, using it seems to be deemed to be a commercial activity and it costs a fortune.

Free Pascal, as you might reasonably expect, doesn’t cost a fortune. However, since I haven’t tried it myself (or even read a review) I’ve no idea what it’s like to use.

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, GarryP said:

At least we don't have to install it from floppy disks; that would take quite a bit longer than 26 minutes.

I remember having to build a system onto a roomful of 40 non-networked PCs using a pile of 20 or so 3 1/4 inch floppy discs. I started with a pile at the front of the room and as each disc finished I moved it to the next machine and so on. So that in the middle of the process 20 or so  machines were each loading from a floppy disc all at the same time. I forget exactly how long it took but it was less than a day, maybe just most of the morning.

William

 

[Alfred]

23 minutes ago, William Overington said:

3 1/4 inch floppy discs

5¼″ or 3½″? 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

For example, I would like to produce some software to demonstrate my research ideas. I am confident that I could write it if facilities like there were in the 1990s were available. I would want to read in a text file such as a Unicode Text Document that had been produced using WordPad and manipulate the characters and then output results.

There are many free programs you could use for that, though discussing which one to use is likely to start a kind of religious war, and it's really off-topic for the Affinity forum. But if anything there are more free programming methods available now than in the 90s.

[GarryP]

Coding today is very cheap compared to back in the day.
Instead of having to purchase something like Turbo Pascal/C, which you pretty much had to do in the olden days (if you wanted to do it legally), you can now get IDEs and SDKs for free from all kinds of places for just about any language you want. (I remember having to pay £99 for Acorn ANSI C back in the 90's.) Just type "coding for free" (without the quotes) into any search engine and you will get millions of results.

As with Walt, I don't want to get into any kind of "religious war" on this but, since you're using Windows, try searching for "Visual Studio Community" and see what you can get. (Or maybe wait a week or so and download the new version that's - apparently - coming instead of having to upgrade almost immediately.)
Also, depending on what you want to do, there may already be a free library that you can use so you could cut your own coding down quite a bit. (E.g. Searching nuget.org - a good place for libraries and extensions, all open source and free - for "text manipulation" shows 2691 packages.)
Or, if you prefer Pascal/Delphi you could also try lazarus-ide.org

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the possibilities for free coding are practically endless.

[William Overington]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

5¼″ or 3½″? 

Oh I have made another mistake! What a thread!

3½″

William

 

[fde101]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

5¼″ or 3½″?

At various times and for various systems there were once 8" floppies and 3" floppies (yes, 3", different from 3.5").  I wouldn't be surprised if there were others around too.

 

4 hours ago, Alfred said:

Free Pascal, as you might reasonably expect, doesn’t cost a fortune. However, since I haven’t tried it myself (or even read a review) I’ve no idea what it’s like to use.

It has been a while since I've looked at FreePascal, but back when I worked with it years ago it was very similar to working with Turbo Pascal, except that it was true 32-bit instead of 16-bit.  It was designed to be compatible with Turbo Pascal (in the sense of accepting the same source code) and the IDE that I was using with it (I think it was bundled?) was largely similar to the Turbo Pascal (DOS) interface, though not 100% the same.

[Alfred]

5 minutes ago, fde101 said:

At various times and for various systems there were once 8" floppies and 3" floppies (yes, 3", different from 3.5").  I wouldn't be surprised if there were others around too.

I think 8″ floppies were only used on mainframe computers like the IBM System/360. As for 3″ floppies, they weren’t anywhere near as widely adopted as the 3½″ ones, so it’s hardly surprising that relatively few microcomputer users have heard of (let alone used!) them.

[Old Bruce]

7 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I think 8″ floppies were only used on mainframe computers like the IBM System/360. As for 3″ floppies, they weren’t anywhere near as widely adopted as the 3½″ ones, so it’s hardly surprising that relatively few microcomputer users have heard of (let alone used!) them.

I used them with a Compugraphic typesetting system. No displays available you would just type and then process the paper strips, hoping you had the correct fonts installed.

[fde101]

8 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I think 8″ floppies were only used on mainframe computers like the IBM System/360.

CP/M was originally developed for systems with 8" floppy drives and that is firmly in microcomputer territory.

 

The original floppy disks were 8" (IBM did invent them) and they were created for this: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/rochester/rochester_4016.html

 

That said, I think this thread is straying quite far from the original topic 

[Michail]

6 hours ago, carl123 said:

I thought the latest version was 1.7.0.270

No: 1.7.0.283 !

[PMan]

Hi,

Going back to the start of this thread about the size of Beta 1.7.0.270 being (on my Windows system 375,237kb) version 1.7.0.283 is also 375,237 kb  though it hasn't got any major changes, just fixes to some stability issues and my download took just 6 minutes.  Interesting to me is the final part of the version numbers which would indicate how many times it was re-written between published updates!  Update to 1.7.0.283 went seamlessly for me

Pman

Windows 10 64 Bit Home Edition,  Affinity Publisher Beta 1.7.0.283,  Affinity Designer Customer Beta 1.7.0.258.  Affinity Photo  Customer Beta 1.7.0.258