Frequently Asked Questions

Q:

How come the MAB (Intel, HP) versions are so much bigger?

A:

The 20% number that NeXT Computer gave when they first started talking about MAB was for the application size, not the binary size.

If you look at the size of Diagram.app (version 2.1) you find that it takes 6.9MB. If it were thin, we would lose the 1.2MB for the Intel version. Therefore, making it MAB only increases the size of the package by 17%.

On the other hand, the size of the binary more than doubles. MAB doesn't do anything fancy, it just concatenates the two versions into one file and NS knows how to recognize a new special magic number for MAB executables.

If you use lipo, you can see that the Motorola version of the executable takes 1.11MB and the Intel version takes 1.18 MB.