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> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes
by benwilber0 1y ago
> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes
How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes
- lawgimenez 1y agoI don’t use their software but if someone has they should be able to decompile it.
- iends 1y agoIt's an electron app.
- mobilemidget 1y agoOr.. Why on earth you need to check for updates 288x per day. It sounds and seems more like 'usage monitoring' rather than being sure that all users have the most recent bug fixes installed. What's wrong with checking for updates upon start once (and cache per day). What critical bugs or fixes could have been issued that warrant 288 update checks.
- partdavid 1y agoIt sounds right, and this is the kind of thing I'd expect if developers are baking configuration into their app distribution. Like, you'd want usage rules or tracking plugins to be timely, and they didn't figure out how to check and distribute configurations in that way without a new app build.
- hulitu 1y ago> they didn't figure out how to check and distribute configurations in that way without a new app build. Any effort to use their brain shall be drastically punished. /s
- f1shy 1y agoWhat's wrong with checking for updates upon start once (and cache per day) For me that would also be wrong, if I cannot disable it in the configuration. I do bot want to extend startup time.
- dontlikeyoueith 1y agoWait until you learn about non-blocking IO. And threads. It's a whole new world out there.
- absolutelastone 1y agoThey probably just combined all phoning home information into one. Usage monitoring includes version used, which leads to automatic update when needed (or when bugged...).
- pcthrowaway 1y agoA 250MB download should be opt-in in the first place
- hulitu 1y ago> A 250MB download should be opt-in in the first place I've read on HN that a lot of people have 10Gb Ethernet at home. /s
- mobilemidget 1y agoI got 8 :)
- zoky 1y agoDo you mean 8 homes with 10Gb Ethernet, or 1 home with 8 10Gb Ethernet connections?
- jenadine 1y ago8 people who have 10Gb Ethernet at home
- 486sx33 1y agoI read it as 1 x 8GB connection But that’s only because I think 8GB is offered in my area. I’ve limited my current service to 1.5GB / 1GB fibre, because well I only run gbit Ethernet … so more sounds totally unnecessary
- mobilemidget 1y ago8 of the 10 Gbits I meant :) sorry I see it reads a bit weird yes. So 8 gbit for single line is the max currently. But huge competition on the horizon, so I expect soon more :)
- pixl97 1y agoBecause developers can suck. I work with developers in SCA/SBOM and there are countless devs that seem to work by #include 'everything'. You see crap where they include a misspelled package name and then they fix it by including the right package but not removing the wrong one!.
- PeeMcGee 1y agoThe lack of dependency awareness drives me insane. Someone imports a single method from the wrong package, which snowballs into the blind leading the blind and pinning transitive dependencies in order to deliver quick "fixes" for things we don't even use or need, which ultimately becomes 100 different kinds of nightmare that stifle any hope of agility.
- xxr 1y agoIn a code review a couple of years ago, I had to say "no" to a dev casually including pandas (and in turn numpy) for a one-liner convenience function in a Django web app that has no involvement with any number crunching whatsoever.
- whstl 1y agoCoincidentally, Copilot has been incredibly liberal lately with its suggestions of including Pandas or Numpy in a tiny non-AI Flask app, even for simple things. I expect things to get worse.
- hooverd 1y agoThere's a ton you can do with sqlite, which is in the Python standard library. You just have to think about it and write some SQL instead of having a nice Pythonic interface.
- thornewolf 1y agoTo push back on this, I consider pandas/numpy so crucial to Python as a whole they are effectively stdlib to me. I wouldn't blink at this because it would happen sooner or later. Unless is was absolutely critical the server have as small as a footprint as humanly possible and it was absolutely guaranteed there would never need to be included in the future of course. However, that first constraint is the main one.
- ericmcer 1y agoThe app itself is probably much bigger than 250mb. If it is using Electron and React/other JS library like a million other UIs just the dependencies will be almost that big.
- latexr 1y agoAs I recall, it’s an Electron app. I just checked and the current version of Google Chrome is 635 MB, with its DMG being 224 MB. So yes, it’s insane, but easy to see where the size comes from.
- tough 1y agoTauri has been a thing for a while, it baffles me people still choose Electron without a good reason to do so. Also webapps are just great nowadays most OS support install PWA's fairly decently no? ffs
- nsingh2 1y agoTauri is not as platform-agnostic as Electron is because it uses different web views depending on the platform. I ran into a few SVG-related problems myself when trying it out for a bit. For example, on Linux, it uses WebKitGTK as the browser engine, which doesn't render the same way Chrome does (which is the web view used on Windows), so multi-platform support is not totally seamless. Using something like Servo as a lightweight, platform-independent web view seems like the way forward, but it's not ready yet.
- tough 1y agoThanks, didn't knew about Servo, hopefully we'll get there Electron really is bloated and any app using it eats my ram whatever how much of it i have
- Izkata 1y ago> Tauri is not as platform agnostic as Electron is Found this a few months ago: https://gifcap.dev/ https://gifcap.dev/ Screen recording straight from a regular browser window, though it creates GIFs instead of video files. Links to a git repo so you can set it up locally.
- lvass 1y ago>on Linux it uses WebKitGTK It's about time Linux desktops adopt some form of ${XDG_WEB_ENGINES:-/opt/web_engines} convention to have web-based programs to fetch their engines as needed and play nice with each other.
- aziaziazi 1y agoJust my hypothesis: some softwares includes video tutorial accessible offline. A short but not-compressed-high-res video can easily go big.
- AndrewStephens 1y ago>> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes > How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes How on earth is a screen recording app on a OS where the API to record the screen is built directly into the OS 250 megabytes? It is extremely irresponsible to assume that your customers have infinite cheap bandwidth. In a previous life I worked with customers with remote sites (think mines or oil rigs in the middle of nowhere) where something like this would have cost them thousands of dollars per hour per computer per site.
- esalman 1y ago> It is extremely irresponsible to assume that your customers have infinite cheap bandwidth Judging by the price of monitor stands, I wouldn't be surprised for Apple to make such assumptions.
- JCharante 1y agoscreen studio is pretty great, it has a lot of features and includes a simple video editor
- dchftcs 1y agoFor a long time iOS did not have features to limit data usage on WiFi. They did introduce an option more recently for iPhone, but it seems such an option is not available to MacOS. Windows supported it as far as I could remember using it with tethering.
- 256_ 1y agoIt was probably written by the type of programmers who criticise programmers like me for using "unsafe" languages.
- ranger_danger 1y agoI would bet money it's electron
- js2 1y agoUnpacked, it's actually 517M on disk: 517M ─┬ Screen Studio.app 100% 517M └─┬ Contents 100% 284M ├─┬ Resources 55% 150M │ ├── app.asar 29% 133M │ └─┬ app.asar.unpacked 26% 117M │ ├─┬ bin 23% 39M │ │ ├── ffmpeg-darwin-arm64 8% 26M │ │ ├── deep-filter-arm64 5% 11M │ │ ├─┬ prod 2% 10.0M │ │ │ └── polyrecorder-prod 2% 11M │ │ ├─┬ beta 2% 10.0M │ │ │ └── polyrecorder-beta 2% 10.0M │ │ ├── hide-icons 2% 9.9M │ │ ├─┬ discovery 2% 8.9M │ │ │ └── polyrecorder 2% 5.6M │ │ └── macos-wallpaper 1% 16M │ └─┬ node_modules 3% 10M │ ├─┬ hide-desktop-icons 2% 10.0M │ │ └─┬ scripts 2% 10.0M │ │ └── HideIcons 2% 5.7M │ └─┬ wallpaper 1% 5.7M │ └─┬ source 1% 5.6M │ └── macos-wallpaper 1% 232M └─┬ Frameworks 45% 231M └─┬ Electron Framework.framework 45% 231M └─┬ Versions 45% 231M └─┬ A 45% 147M ├── Electron Framework 29% 57M ├─┬ Resources 11% 10.0M │ ├── icudtl.dat 2% 5.5M │ └── resources.pak 1% 24M └─┬ Libraries 5% 15M ├── libvk_swiftshader.dylib 3% 6.8M └── libGLESv2.dylib 1%
- stevage 1y agoSo looks like the app itself is about 10MB but there are multiple copies of it, a bundled ffmpeg and all kinds of crap like wallpaper?
- js2 1y agoI'm not sure why there are both app.asar and app.asar.unpacked. I did just run `npx @electron/asar extract app.asar` and confirmed it's a superset of app.asar.unpacked. The unpacked files are mostly executables, so it may have something to do with code signing requirements.
- hi_hi 1y agoFor context, the latest iOS update is ~3.2GB, and the changelog highlights are basically 8 new emojis, some security updates, some bug fixes. It makes me want to cry.
- jcgl 1y agoThat 3.2G is some sort of compressed OS image though, right? So it’d be of a constant size relative to whatever changes or updates it brings.