Since I wasn't able to glean an appropriate answer from searching the forums I figured I'd post this. I was wondering what the practical limits were for the total number of apps that menu system will support?
I use a 64 gig stick formatted as exFAT. It has just under 900 separate portable apps stored on it. Occasionally the menu crashes. Sometimes it just freezes, other times it throws exceptions. This doesn't happen a lot, not enough anyway for me to submit a bug, but I was just wondering what the expected limits are.
Also on a side note, one thing I noticed is that over time the portableappsmenu.ini file can become a garbage dump. As I change configurations, add, move, or remove apps, the old entries just hang around. On my old 16 gig stick it was starting to take a long time just for the menu to load. I could go through and painstakingly sort the lines but there should be a better way. Would it be possible to have a switch somewhere where the program could output a list of files it cannot locate or verify? It's already parsing the file and checking the apps listed there so I would think it shouldn't be too difficult to simply dump the results out to a log file. That way I could clean the file up with a minimum of work.
And just a comment John, I love this program. I use the heck out of it and have sent contributions over twice now. Keep up the good work.
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Not sure about your other questions, but the crashes may be related to the second item on the bug tracker:
Platform crashes after 100+ refreshes due to GDI leak, can happen quicker if you have 100s of apps and update dozens at a time. [50% fixed in release]
https://portableapps.com/node/28593
I used to have a sig...until one of the mods ate it
I've also got fed up cleaning the .ini file of all the junk left over but don't do it too often thankfully! I was thinking something should be done about it too. Maybe when you uninstall an app it asks if you want to delete the settings in this file?
Also, it's not possible to uninstall Non-PA apps so this would need sorting too if the plan is to incorporate them into the platform.
Live for an ideal and leave no place in the mind for anything else.
Yes a large number of these apps are not from PortableApps.com but they do still integrate into the menu system. Those are the real issue. Even though they are not regular PA apps they still get parsed by the menu so it should be able to dump a list of the ones it cannot validate. I would expect that to be a small code change. The big question is is it something John would consider adding.
You can uninstall non-PA apps just by right-clicking them as well. But, uninstalling doesn't yet remove any custom renaming, hiding, recategorization, etc you've done. That's something that will be added shortly.
As will improved icon handling (eliminating the crash due to a resource handle leak) and caching (improving start and refresh speed). The code for these is a bit over 1/2 done.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Would this explain why I'm seeing very slow scrolling speed on my menu of late? I was thinking it might be due to the last platform update but I'd like to fix it, whatever the cause. Thanks!
[edit] I do have LibO set to only display the 1 main icon instead of all. Could that be related? [/edit]