Apple's program sizes



  •  Fresh from AppleInsider:

    Apple's file sizes

     

    Just one question: How the F can Mail be 91 MB let alone 287 for "two copies"?

     



  • Aren't they dropping PowerPC support in Snow Leopard? That'd shave a considerable bit off of the application size as they're all fat binaries in Leopard. Then again a lot of the space used there is likely resources.



  • @Latexxx said:

    Just one question: How the F can Mail be 91 MB let alone 287 for "two copies"?

    In a default installation of Leopard (Mac OS 10.5), Mail.app contains 18 localizations. Each localization is between 15 and 16 MB. (That's where the overwhelming bulk of the size of Mail.app comes from -- that's 276 MB, right there. The actual program binary is 5 MB.)

    Each of those localizations contains ~100 items. The English localization contains:

    • A folder with the English-language help (2.4 MB)
    • 79 nib bundles (containing window layouts and hard-coded strings)
    • A default stationery document
    • 17 ".strings" files (used for localized strings)
    • A single graphic (the stop sign, since stop signs aren't the same everywhere)

    Although you might suppose that the real problem is that there are 18 localizations, that's not really true. Each of those 79 nib bundles contains two files: "designable.nib" and "keyedobjects.nib". You don't need "designable.nib" -- it has the same relation to "keyedobjects.nib" as a source code file plays to a compiled binary. But "designable.nib" is pretty much always larger than "keyedobjects.nib". I just opened the "AccountInfo.nib" bundle, and the sizes are ~92 KB and ~8 KB. Some of the other nib bundles have 200 or 300 KB used on "designable.nib".

    Now, suppose the average size of "designable.nib" in Mail.app is 100 KB (which is probably low), and that each localization contains 79 nib bundles (which was the case on the two I checked). There are 18 localizations, so you could, without harming anything, remove 18 * 79 * 100 KB from Mail.app, or 138.87 MB.



  • @Thalagyrt said:

    Aren't they dropping PowerPC support in Snow Leopard? That'd shave a considerable bit off of the application size as they're all fat binaries in Leopard. Then again a lot of the space used there is likely resources.

    Well, maybe. The developer preview doesn't support PowerPC, but that doesn't necessarily mean they won't support it in the final release. More importantly, though, if Snow Leopard (can we ditch the stupid names? It's going to be 10.6.) can still run PowerPC programs via Rosetta, then they'll need to maintain the PowerPC versions of all the libraries, so it won't save much space, if any, even if they strip the PowerPC code from the binary files. (The actual binaries take up almost no space compared with graphics and "designable.nib".)



  • actual program size: 6MB for 2 architectures

    Moderator's note: Garbage collected.



  •  god damn it.  you could have fucking summarized, or done something other than print ever damn file...   shit man.



  • Just a followup: according to a quick Perl script to recurse through Mail.app in 10.5.3, the total size of the "designable.nib" files is 209256463 bytes, or 199.6 MB. (Some of that is from the "MailTimeMachineHelper.app" program which is inside Mail.app.)



  • @tster said:

     god damn it.  you could have fucking summarized, or done something other than print ever damn file...   shit man.

     

     

    I may have overdone it a bit.  But you have to admit, that listing is an overwhelmingly conclusive answer to the OP's question.



  • @joe_bruin said:

    Filed under: longest_post_EVER

    Not if someone quotes it and adds something underneath. Any takers?



  • @joe_bruin said:

    I may have overdone it a bit.  But you have to admit, that listing is an overwhelmingly conclusive answer to the OP's question.

    You may? -_O

    A long post to make a physical point - fine. But please don't reduce my scrollbar to a tiny scrap of grey, you fiendsih intendor.



  • @joe_bruin said:

    Moderator's note: Garbage collected.
     

    There's a moderator on TDWTF?



  • 'Bout time. It's as if, since the beginning of OSX, they stopped caring about the program size (code size isn't really a problem, even with Universal Binaries, except for the libraries and frameworks which contain a lot of code and must support all four architectures). Another source of wasted space is in the help files: these are simple HTML pages, and the resources for these pages (images, css, etc.) are duplicated between all localizations (some of the images are localization-specific, but most of them aren't), which can take something like 1MB per app and per localization...

    But the worst are some Freeverse games bundled with 10.4 which go overboard with effects, animations, and all other fuzz, which make them weight more than 10 MB each, including the silly tic-tac-toe one - and they don't have the excuse of localization since they are only in English. The resources for these are in an ostensibly-named "shared" folder which is replicated in the resources folder of every one of the 6 games. But the worst thing is that I realised these games, every time they are launched, save a zip archive of themselves in my home folder if it isn't there already. That was the last straw. I removed them off my hard drive. They can come back when they've learned to respect my disk space.

    I bet you that the drive to reduce the footprint of 10.6 comes from when they ported the core of "OSX" (which is itself relatively scalable) for the iPhone, and they realised they were many space savings to be made, and therefore they created a wide gap bteween "iPhone" OSX and "Mac" OS X, which they're attempting to fill with 10.6. That was the single point I was most happy about when reading the Snow Leopard info.



  • @mallard said:

    There's a moderator on TDWTF?
     

    Open your eyes much?



  • @mallard said:

    There's a moderator on TDWTF?

    Actually,  there are even eight of us, though I'm apparantly the most active one in the forums (but not on the front page).



  • @joe_bruin said:

    Moderator's note: Garbage collected.

    Moderator's note: More garbage collected.



  • @joe_bruin said:

    Weak, dude. Some people have no sense of humor.
     

    I am sorry, remind us all again how flooding the forums with garbage is 'humor'?



  •  Woah, what did I miss? I check out this topic, and the "garbage collection" is already complete. (Then again, mebe I don't wanna know what went on.)



  • @Doctor Steel said:

     Woah, what did I miss?

     

    Just an endless listing of files and their size on a mac. Made the forum hard to read, though.



  • @ammoQ said:

    @Doctor Steel said:

     Woah, what did I miss?

     

    Just an endless listing of files and their size on a mac. Made the forum hard to read, though.

     

    Should've left it up.  Maybe some of us would have wanted to see it, no? 



  • <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CNelson%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"><style> </style>

     I'm not a Mac guy, and for a total of about two seconds I honestly thought that the graph was comparing the weight of a Leopard and a Snow Leopard in megabytes… that was more amusing to me then noting an excessively large mail application… however, you must admit that these names that Apple comes up with are just plain silly.



  •  @joe_bruin said:

    @joe_bruin said:

    Moderator's note: Garbage collected.

    Moderator's note: More garbage collected.

    I was not offended at the first moderation, I can understand it.

    However, the second post (consisting of "Weak, dude. Some people have no sense of humor.") needed moderation?  Please explain why.



  • @joe_bruin said:

    Please explain why.
     

    Because you are being a dick.

    You weren't funny the first time, you certainly aren't funny the second time, and this time is just sad.



  • @NorseLaQuet said:

    you must admit that these names that Apple comes up with
    are just plain silly.

    They are no worse than Vista or Vienna, and Snow Leopard makes sense as it is a cleaner, purer version of Leopard.

    I wonder what they will do when they run out of big cats.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @joe_bruin said:

    Please explain why.
     

    Because you are being a dick.

    You weren't funny the first time, you certainly aren't funny the second time, and this time is just sad.

    I may be a dick, it's certainly possible, but I wasn't abusive.  I hardly think it's worthy of moderation. You just called me a dick and you're not getting moderated, whereas I simply implied a phantom moderator is humorless.  Like I said, I'm not arguing against the moderation of my first post, I'm merely expressing my dissatisfaction with that action.  Am I not allowed to do that?


  • @joe_bruin said:

    Am I not allowed to do that?
     

    You sure are. Just in the same way anyone here can call you a dick for posting random garbage to our thread and then trying to call out our moderator (whom we like and respect here).



  • @joe_bruin said:

    Like I said, I'm not arguing against the moderation of my first post, I'm merely expressing my dissatisfaction with that action.  Am I not allowed to do that?

     

    Cry me a river. Making the thread unreadable is not funny for anyone who wishes to actually discuss the topic. Discussing the moderation is inherently off-topic and likely to derail the thread.



  • @NorseLaQuet said:

    … however, you must admit that these names that Apple comes up with
    are just plain silly.

    I believe the cat names (Panther, Jaguar, Tiger, Leopard) started out as just another project code-naming scheme. That's pretty standard — you give the project a code name so you can talk about it internally while your marketing people figure out what version number they want to put on the thing. The weird thing is that at some point Apple started using those names publicly instead of keeping them internal. The worst part is, I've been hearing rumors that after "Snow Leopard," they'll be going to "LOL Cats."



  • @dgvid said:

    The worst part is, I've been hearing rumors that after "Snow Leopard," they'll be going to "LOL Cats."

    Oh, god, why did you have to say that? Now I can't stop imagining an Apple advertising campaign from hell:

    Safari saved you a cookie, but it eated it

    Invisible backups!!!

    Lickable GUI is lickable

    iPod can haz cheezburger

    Ur files. I storez them.

    .Mac haz mah bukkit

    ...and the inevitable iChat is watching you masturbate



  •  Some good research by The Vicar,needs to be said.

    However, wtf is up with TextEdit going from 22 MB to 2 MB, that's a 90% drop, surely it can't be localization?



  • @colourAgga said:

    However, wtf is up with TextEdit going from 22 MB to 2 MB, that's a 90% drop, surely it can't be localization?

    I think probably the developer preview doesn't have help files for all the localizations. (If they've changed TextEdit substantially, that would explain why.) In 10.5.3, localizations take up 21.4 MB of TextEdit.app, and only 2 MB of that is "designable.nib". But each localization has a help folder, which is ~900 KB, which is the right size.



  • I just got rid of all of the designable.nib files on my 10.5.3 installation under /Applications, and it freed up about 500MB total -- 200MB in Mail.app alone. Now, there are other apps in there besides the ones that come with Leopard, so it's not fair to say that it's all cruft with Leopard.

    Now my app sizes are more in line with the Snow Leopard sizes. What's annoying about this is that Apple should release this as part of 10.5.4, IMO, but instead are choosing to wait til 10.6 which may or may not be released for PPC Macs.



  •  How is a calculator and a dictionary the same size?



  • They are the same size because the dictionary info isn't actually in Dictionary.app -- it's stored in /Library/Dictionaries instead. OS X has system wide dictionary support so that Apps can use them as well.



  • @Yaos said:

    How is a calculator and a dictionary the same size?
    You obviously didn't see many of the OMGWTF contest entries.  Some of them did no math at all, simply looked up the answer.


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