UB sizes (was: Rev 2.7.4 standalone versions)

[Ian Wood]

On 1 Oct 2006, at 15:52, Malte Brill wrote:
> One reason might be filesize. Universal apps are twice as big.

Some thought and tests show that that's simply not true... ;-) I've  
seen this idea floating around plenty of times on Mac forums, but was  
a bit surprised to see it mentioned on a developer list.

The *binary* would be roughly twice as large, the *application* is  
not. This becomes obvious when looking inside the package of  
applications not made with Revolution - typically you will find all  
the interface elements, help files etc. outside the binary  
application file so obviously these files are not duplicated.

A good example is iMovie HD - the application package is around 80MB,  
but the binary file is a *mere* 6MB for the UB version.

A quick test with Rev shows that although all included images etc.  
are embedded into the binary, it IS doing some sensible stuff -  
dropping a load of images onto a test stack then building leads to:

Intel package	6.4MB
PPC package	6.7MB
UB package		8.4MB

You are basically looking at a couple of extra megabytes for the  
addition of the extra engine. This appears to be consistent even when  
the stack is drastically different in size, as an empty stack and a  
full-blown working stack+sub-stacks with loads of externals both gave  
results within 2MB between PPC and UB builds.

So I really can't see file size as an issue. Being limited to 10.3  
and above is likely to be much more of an issue...

Ian