Designer Startup Time …

[Dr_No 3]

I am using Designer 1.7.2. My question is: WHY does it take so long to OPEN? Most times there's no splash screen to indicate it's opening. The Dock icon displays the flash-y black triangle beneath the AD logo, but no splash screen appears, no document creation page opens; there's just - NOTHING. My machine is a Mac Pro (G5 desktop) with 1TB internal HD (SPODs), i7 Xeon 'Nehelem' quadcore chipset, 12GB RAM, and 775GB free space. My I'net connexion is 180 Mbps. I xfer most of my work to external HDs so as to keep its desktop open. Designer should open in a flash! It doesn't.

Can someone please tell me why this is? Three-to-five-minute waits are not uncommon. It is now going beyond simple annoyance and approaching genuine P.I.T.A. territory. One immediate effect is to make me question whether I really want to proceed with the purchase of Photos and Publisher. If they're as annoyingly slow to open as Designer, that may be put on hold. To be sure, once Designer makes up its tiny electronic 'mind' to allow access to its features, it's great. It's just getting past the 'snotty teenager' behavior trying to get it to open. I'd also like to know why there's no splash screen displayed during opening to at least give me a hint it's trying to do something.

As 'FWIW' information, I activated my currently-installed full version from the TRIAL version at expiry. I still have the 1.7.1 .dmg in an XHD folder if needed. 

All input appreciated.

[Pšenda 375]

7 hours ago, Dr_No said:

WHY does it take so long to OPEN?

My start:

ADesigner - 00:00:13, next start is only 00:00:06.

APhoto - 00:00:12.

APublisher - 00:00:11.

Try Factory reset (start with Ctrl/Cmd), or reinstall.

[Alfred 4,519]

5 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Try Factory reset (start with Ctrl/Cmd), or reinstall.

In most cases Ctrl on Windows is equivalent to Cmd on Mac, but in this particular case the same key is used on both platforms: if you hold down the Ctrl key while launching the app, the ‘Clear User Data’ dialog will appear.

[rintin 4]

My times:

-Deigner: 5.61 seconds

-Photo: 4.38 seconds

 

My config:

• cpu: i7-6700
• os: windows 10 home
• Note: these apps (and os) are in a SSD.

[R C-R 3,500]

1. How many other apps are open when you launch Affinity Designer?
2. How many fonts are installed on your Mac?
3. Does the Designer Dock icon hop up & down immediately after you launch the app or is there a delay before that happens (if it does at all)?
4. Which version of the Mac OS are you running?
5. If you right-click on the Dock icon & select Options > "Show in Finder" is the window that opens the root level Applications folder on your startup drive, or a subfolder of that folder or a folder in any other location?
6. Do you run any third party add-on 'helpers' or 'enhancers' or 'shortcuts' that could affect launching apps, even indirectly?

[Pšenda 375]

11 minutes ago, R C-R said:

How many fonts are installed on your Mac?

OP write

10 hours ago, Dr_No said:

Most times there's no splash screen to indicate it's opening.

So I suppose OP has some problem that will not be related to font loading. These are not loaded until the Splash screen is displayed, see message "Font loading ...".

[R C-R 3,500]

41 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

So I suppose OP has some problem that will not be related to font loading. These are not loaded until the Splash screen is displayed, see message "Font loading ...".

That does not happen on my Mac. The splash screen only shows after the fonts have loaded, the Dock icon quits hopping up & down, & (I think) a few other 'sanity checks' have been done.

Maybe this is a Mac vs. Windows difference?

[benrymnd 5]

I am having the same problem AF takes forever to open with the app dancing up and down until AF opens I on an iMac running Mojave

[Dr_No 3]

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

• How many other apps are open when you launch Affinity Designer?
• How many fonts are installed on your Mac?
• Does the Designer Dock icon hop up & down immediately after you launch the app or is there a delay before that happens (if it does at all)?
• Which version of the Mac OS are you running?
• If you right-click on the Dock icon & select Options > "Show in Finder" is the window that opens the root level Applications folder on your startup drive, or a subfolder of that folder or a folder in any other location?
• Do you run any third party add-on 'helpers' or 'enhancers' or 'shortcuts' that could affect launching apps, even indirectly?

1. No other apps are open.

2. Fonts: Approx. 4K +/ - (This does not affect Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or QuarkXpress' opening time and splash screen display.)

3. No icon for any of my apps 'hops' - a black triangle flashes beneath the app's icon and turns black when the app is ready to use.

4. OS X 'Sierra.' Other tech specs are in my original posting.

5. Root level Applications folder.

6. Can you be more specific as to the type of '3rd-party-helper,' 'enhancer,' etc to which you refer?

[thomaso 356]

There appears to be something corrupted in your user library folder.

What happens if you boot as a different user, possibly a new one? Does Affinity launch faster there?

22 minutes ago, Dr_No said:

6. Can you be more specific as to the type of '3rd-party-helper,' 'enhancer,' etc to which you refer?

An easy way to detect such applications you might try "EtreCheck", which does a search through all apps/processes/daemons and marks those in red which might cause troubles. https://etrecheck.com/

[Dr_No 3]

5 hours ago, thomaso said:

An easy way to detect such applications you might try "EtreCheck", which does a search through all apps/processes/daemons and marks those in red which might cause troubles. https://etrecheck.com/

Did that with Etre Check Pro … everything is as it should be - but I did find some obsolete 32-bit apps I got rid of in the doing ’cos they were PPC.

[thomaso 356]

That's fine, but those 32-bit apps would not cause the slow launch of Affinity.

How about launching Affinity in a different user?

[Alfred 4,519]

6 hours ago, Dr_No said:

Fonts: Approx. 4K +/ -

I believe font handling has recently been improved in all of the desktop apps, but 4000 installed fonts is probably still too many. Try deactivating all but a few hundred of them.

[thomaso 356]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

but 4000 installed fonts

I wonder whether they are just in the pool of a font managing app – but not activated indeed.
Otherwise, just scrolling through such a large font menu to select a font whose name does not begin with "A", this would be a pain ... and Dr_No possibly used to wait while working

 

[walt.farrell 2,100]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Otherwise, just scrolling through such a large font menu to select a font whose name does not begin with "A", this would be a pain ... and Dr_No possibly used to wait while working

Of course, if you know the name of the font you want, or its initial letters, you can type them and the list will scroll automatically

(But if you're not sure, and need to scroll to see what they look like, then yes, that's a lot of scrolling.)

[Dr_No 3]

55 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Of course, if you know the name of the font you want, or its initial letters, you can type them and the list will scroll automatically

(But if you're not sure, and need to scroll to see what they look like, then yes, that's a lot of scrolling.)

Bingo! That's exactly how one avoids the dreaded 'Helvetica Crawl' …

[Dr_No 3]

57 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Of course, if you know the name of the font you want, or its initial letters, you can type them and the list will scroll automatically

(But if you're not sure, and need to scroll to see what they look like, then yes, that's a lot of scrolling.)

Apologies … I neglected to mention after stating that I have 4K +/- fonts installed that only about 1,200 +/- are ACTIVATED. Didn't mean to mislead about that.

[thomaso 356]

2 minutes ago, Dr_No said:

only about 1,200 +/- are ACTIVATED

I assumed the 4K wouldn't. Just curious: do you know all 1,200 by name? If not: do you scroll through the pulldown menu?

[R C-R 3,500]

8 hours ago, Dr_No said:

3. No icon for any of my apps 'hops' - a black triangle flashes beneath the app's icon and turns black when the app is ready to use.

Sorry, I forgot that in System Preferences > Dock we have the option to "Animate opening applications" or not. (Animate means making the Dock icon hop.) So if yours does not hop it is not in itself a sign of anything being wrong. 

[Dr_No 3]

33 minutes ago, thomaso said:

I assumed the 4K wouldn't. Just curious: do you know all 1,200 by name? If not: do you scroll through the pulldown menu?

Heh. That's funny. Even my Majestique Mega-Memory isn't sufficient to master that ever-changing list. It's hard enough distinguishing them visually …

[Dr_No 3]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Sorry, I forgot that in System Preferences > Dock we have the option to "Animate opening applications" or not. (Animate means making the Dock icon hop.) So if yours does not hop it is not in itself a sign of anything being wrong. 

Y' know, I never even looked in SysPrefs to see if that was doable. I might make that change just so I have a more noticeable visual on opening any app. Thanks for the heads-up.

[thomaso 356]

3 minutes ago, Dr_No said:

It's hard enough distinguishing them visually … 

So how do you distinguish them? Is it by name, as Walt felt to suggest?

[Dr_No 3]

Just now, thomaso said:

So how do you distinguish them? Is it by name, as Walt felt to suggest?

I know approximately 50% of my 'go-to' fonts by name. If I know the 'look' I want but can't remember the name, simply highlighting a font (any font) and then using the scroll feature of Apple's 'Mighty Mouse' makes pretty quick work of getting from 'A' to 'wherever' I need to be. If I can't remember a specific name but remember the first letter of its name, I just type in (for example) an 'E' and then scroll until I find what I'm looking for. It's a 'Q&D' (Quick & Dirty') workaround until Perfection arrives.

[thomaso 356]

ok. magic mouse doesn't do the trick. it's rather you.

Back brutal to roots: How about launching Affinity in a different user?

[Dr_No 3]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

ok. magic mouse doesn't do the trick. it's rather you.

Back brutal to roots: How about launching Affinity in a different user?

No diff. Same for testing in 'Safe Mode' … latest time-to-open (discounting two force quit / restarts for 'Application Not Responding') is 5:35 - that's minutes, not seconds … 

I don't believe it's an issue with HD space, fonts, or anything else. No OTHER app takes anywhere near this long to open. This is unacceptably long …