I just gave in to some nagware and agreed to download a newer version of Fetch. It’s a necessary tool, because sometimes Dreamweaver is not sufficient or carries too much overhead. You just want a simple FTP program to move a file from one computer to another, and Fetch is one of the best options for Mac. Being a cautious sort of person I didn’t just copy the new version on top of the other, I renamed the old one first. Through this I noticed a huge differences in the file sizes.
- Fetch 5.0.4 = 13.7 Mb
- Fetch 5.2.1 = 56.3 Mb
What on earth could be going on here?
In theory, later versions of a simple piece of utility software like an FTP program should get slightly smaller as more efficient code is introduced, not over four times bigger!
Now that computer memory comes in chunks of 1Gb are we going to see the world’s first 500Mb text editor?
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
I like fetch too.
Probably a jump to universal to support intel macs added most of that. Fetch went universal at 5.1. Maybe it will slim down when they stop supporting PowerPCs.
With broadband and big hard disks I often don’t even notice these things until I check the size of my download folder.
Doh. That’s a perfectly good explanation and rationale for accepting the increased size. My irritation this afternoon was particularly uncalled for since, if they slimmed it down by not supporting legacy Macs…..
then it wouldn’t run at all in this house!
Must get one of these new iMacs.
There are three things going on in the size jump from 5.0.5 to 5.1 (and later):
1) As John mentioned, Fetch became a Universal application, which doubled the size of our executable code.
2) Fetch 5.1 and later include the StuffIt engine, so you can encode and decode StuffIt, Zip, Tar and Gzip formats without having to go install StuffIt Expander. The StuffIt engine is Universal, which helps performance but makes it quite large (nearly 15MB expanded).
3) Fetch 5.1 also added a Dashboard widget and 11 Automator actions, to take advantage of those technologies introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
Thanks,
Jim Matthews
Fetch Softworks