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Application won't start at all


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@stokerg I admit that I thought about making a user but yesterday didn't had the opportunity to explore that case and I also thought that with those applications shared ... and all setup I should get the same issue we had ... but no, so I'm trying to figure out what is the difference between those two profiles that could block the one on the main user... 

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14 minutes ago, stokerg said:

It really is sounding like another app getting in the way of Designer.  May explain why the New User Account worked but then again, if that's shared the Apps from your other user account, i'd expect the same issue in the new one.

All apps in the top level Applications folder (the path shown in this earlier post for "Where:") are automatically shared among all standard & admin user accounts. There is no need to do anything special for this. (For more about user account types, see for example How to Set Up Multiple User Accounts in macOS.)

The big difference is a newly created user account does not automatically start up most add-ons like login items, menu items, etc. enabled in any other existing user account. (Some add-ons have an option to 'install' for all user accounts, & a few rudely do this without asking if they should or not.)

This is why creating a brand new user account is such a useful troubleshooting step -- when an issue that occurs in an existing account does not occur in the newly created one, the cause must be something in the existing one.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I think it’s not only the login items list to look for, Laureline. For instance, my Saffire Pro audio interface installed a driver that is loaded every time I login to my account. Okay, maybe that’s a bad example, as this driver was installed for all users on my Mac. But regardless, there might be plugins or drivers or any applications running background processes that are launched under your standard user account only, and these processes might interfere with the proper operation of the Affinity Suite.

So you might want to open Activity Monitor from your Utilities folder inside the Applications folder and (a) check for processes running when you are logged in to your standard account and (b) do the same for processes that are running when you are logged in to your blank, newly created account. You can simply print the process list to PDF and compare. That should bring you closer to a solution. Hopefully. :)

Activity-Monitor.png

 

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3 hours ago, Laureline said:

Already did that yesterday or before yesterday , I'll do it a second time and let you know 

• Can you post a screenshot of your Activity Monitor CPU usage (sorted by %) while Affinity is launching in your affected user?

• Do you experience any other app running slow or can you hear the fan rotating intense?

• Do you have Time Machine activated and running hourly?

• Does Affinity launch at all when you boot in safe boot mode?
(press 'shift' when switching the computer on. It is much slower than usual. It does a system file check and loads only a minimal set of extensions necessary for macOS. Also Affinity will start slow but possibly does start at all. If yes you have one more indication for being a user related extension or corrupted preference or cache file or corrupted permissions)

• Have you tried resetting access rights/user permissions in the affected user?
(copy/paste into a Terminal.app window and hit enter:

diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`

 

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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- First it launches then it seems to disappears
- the only slow opening app I had was the troubles I had with Affinity Suite ( but was handle last time except for Designer ) otherwise past experience was with heavy soft such as photoshop, animate; during the dan were not rotating, then it did for a sec and then came back to normal ( Affinity still launching and still has no splash, no panel, etc )
- no time machine activated
- it does display the workspace with the splashscreen however : kept on having a spinning loader as cursor 
-  I did not tried this command

 

 


image.thumb.png.f644ea45907d5af1c85b26d8f161e5d7.png

 

 

 

image.png

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  •   - First it launches then it seems to disappears   

1. What launches and disappears?

2. Was the 2nd screenshot from booting in Safe Boot Mode?

3. In both screenshots the process "bird" is the most CPU demanding. Also seem to insist a few mdworker processes. Even though there is still 36% and 59% CPU unused ("idle") I would ecspect more if no app is working. It might mean there is a lot of traffic with iCloud ("bird" – How do you use it? As backup?) or issues with updating the spotlight data base ("mdworker", "mds").

4. You could temporarily deactivate iCloud ('bird') and "CleanMyMac" and reboot and see if it helps to speed up Affinity.

5. Also you could trash the spotlight database and let it rebuild from scratch:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716 
... or in French: https://support.apple.com/fr-fr/HT203538
You could do that over night since it will run in the background for a few hours.

  • the command did nothing :)

6. No response at all? in the Terminal window after pasting & enter? Very unusual if it does respond with nothing.
Alternatively you can go through this steps:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538
... French:  https://support.apple.com/fr-fr/HT201716

7. So did I understand you right that you do not have issues with your mac except with Affinity? I am asking because Affinity had run smoothly when you was logged-in as a different user; that would mean there is something unusual in user "lowla".

 

 

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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18 minutes ago, thomaso said:

3. In both screenshots the process "bird" is the most CPU demanding. Also seem to insist a few mdworker processes.

From the bird(8) man page:

Quote

bird is one of the system daemons backing the Documents in the Cloud feature.
There are no configuration options to bird, and users should not run bird manually.

The high CPU usage of bird & all those mdworker_shared processes ("md" stands for metadata) together suggest the "Optimize Mac Storage" option is enabled in System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Options (or via About this Mac > Storage > Recommendations > "Store in iCloud").

It is not clear (among other things!) how file sharing is set up on this Mac, or if it is needed. In any event, bird should eventually settle down to a very low CPU % after everything is uploaded to iCloud & whatever sharing among different devices & users is fully synced, so if that doesn't happen it suggests something may be amiss with the network connection or how sharing is configured in System Preferences > Sharing.

26 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

“CleanMyMac” … do you really need that? That would be the first thing I’d disable. :ph34r:

I agree 100% with that. Contrary to what you might read on the web (much of it from dubious sources) CleanMyMac & all such similar 'cleaning' utilities are not needed to keep a Mac running efficiently. Worse, it is not unusual for these things to interfere with the proper functioning of other software or the OS itself.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1. Designer launches then stop ...
2. the second screenshot is to let you guys know than from few second to others Designer disappears and it's not see as a task running
3. ICloud : to store some files: but actually I was wondering what "bird" was .
Then I don't know "mdworker" and "mds": what are those ?
4. Sure thing
5. I'll check
6. It did run bun I meant it didn't solved anything after launching designer 
7. I don't feel like I am having mac issues so far, no

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2 hours ago, Laureline said:

Then I don't know "mdworker" and "mds": what are those ?

"md" stands for metadata. Metadata is data about other data, for example where a file is stored, when it was created or modified, & various attributes of the data it contains.

Metadata is collected by 'workers' running in the background. The OS level metadata service "mds" is owned by root, the so-called superuser that in the Mac OS has almost unlimited access privileges to almost everything running on the computer. There can be many mdworker processes running concurrently, including ones owned by user "_spotlight" that powers searches & several other things in the Mac OS. However, they should be active (using CPU time) only when needed to index new metadata or to provide metadata needed by some other process.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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3 hours ago, Laureline said:

2. the second screenshot is to let you guys know than from few second to others Designer disappears and it's not see as a task running

This screenshot appears not to show the complete list of running processes. Besides a 'disappeared' Affinity Designer there also is no Finder for instance.
It visually lists about 30, which definitely is not the hole lot; at the bottom right it mentions 291 processes.

3 hours ago, Laureline said:

3. ICloud : to store some files: but actually I was wondering what "bird" was .

As you can see this bird is quite busy on your mac – for a reason I don't know.
As R-CR mentioned there might be an issue with network connection (WLAN or LAN for instance).
– What does change if you cut the network completely by either unplugging or switching it off?

3 hours ago, Laureline said:

Then I don't know "mdworker" and "mds": what are those ?

"md" means 'meta data', "mds" is 'meta data server'. All those md-related processes keep the file system in its current state. That means they are watching permanently in the background (0% CPU) and pop up with work when a file does change in any folder, either in your documents or in any system folder, as for instance caches, application preferences or whatever. And they also feed the spotlight database, to make a search work that fast and showing correct results. They usually are busy directly after booting your mac but calm down after a couple of seconds or minutes, depending on the amount of changes they have to check, to compare or to update.

Since is seems your mac has issues itself it might become hard or impossible to solve the issues with Affinity. Again, the fact that Designer runs when you logged-in as a different user makes it obvious that the issues are related to the user Library folder of the user "lowla". To be able to fix this it is necessary to know what in detail is different between "lowla" and the other user. Running an app like "CleanMyMac", which actually tries to be smarter than the system, possibly can have changed things even if you had run it only once. Those changed things can confuse the system sustainable and make it nearly impossible to fix it by itself because it does not know what such an application has done but just realizes its own data got manipulated. Then it can't understand itself any more. Simply spoken.

As a next step I would recommend to make 3 more screenshots of the CPU usage in Activity monitor, taken at different times:
1. after booting the mac,
2. after just working with any apps
3. after not using for min. 30 minutes but running (no sleep mode)

Also, parallel, you could use the Console.app to get hints of various things which the system might suspect to be problematic. Therefore you start the app, select the mac in the sidebar  and hit the button "Errors" in its according translation on your mac. Mine looks like this:
1060369991_console-errors.jpg.499d283af9c6a53aa6979d41221e8364.jpg

Let in run while using your mac or when not using it. Possibly it will collect messages that will hint to relevant issues. Usually it finds much more than is really a problem.
As an alternative you can check the existing protocols by clicking through the sidebar items with using the search field to filter th results to specific processes, as for instance 'bird' or 'mds', 'md-worker' etc.

 

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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  • CleanMyMac is there from yesterday, no longer so I'm pretty sure it did not break the main user : ).
  • Then a log from the console has already been sent to Affinity.
What does change if you cut the network completely by either unplugging or switching it off?
  • Nope it didn't change a thing
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2 minutes ago, Laureline said:

Then a log from the console has already been sent to Affinity.

Ah, Serif is working on it, that's good news, I haven't been aware about when asking you all these questions, sorry.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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7 hours ago, thomaso said:

This screenshot appears not to show the complete list of running processes. Besides a 'disappeared' Affinity Designer there also is no Finder for instance.
It visually lists about 30, which definitely is not the hole lot; at the bottom right it mentions 291 processes.

As can be seen from the title bar, the first screenshot only shows active processes. Since we don't know what the second one shows (because the title bar is not shown), we don't know if it also shows just active processes or what. Thus, there is no way to tell if Affinity Designer is still running or not, because it simply could be running but not active.

For example, at the moment I have Affinity Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, & Affinity Photo Beta running on my Mac. Because none of them have a document window open, they only appear very briefly from time to time on the active list, & only if I set Activity Monitor's Update frequency to "Often" or "Very Often" do I see them appear at all.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Well boys :) Thanks a lot for all your assistant and also the Affinity team for support and following my issue.
I decided to reset my 
Mac to factory, have to admit that I can't wait to use it in its entirety and don't have that much time and need to work with :)
 
Just before this period I was customising the command on affinity, I really hope this is not the thing that crashes the app ( I'm afraid of breaking it again XD ) .

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