I'm planning on making a launcher for Hugin Panorama tools and have one question.
Is it possible to make a portable app that uses a different version of the app for different OS versions?
Here's the full story. The last version of Hugin that was compatible with Win XP was version 2013.0.0
But they are now at version 2016.2.0 for both 32 and 64 bit versions used for versions of Vista and later.
So, since I want to maximize the compatibility of the app, I'd like to make it able to start the lower version if XP is detected. But is that possible?
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Not without Custom coding it that way.
With that said, if the publisher doesn't provide a version compatible with XP, it's not up to you to do so. If you're wanting to provide a version that is, I would recommend building two separate packages - one with an AppID something like PanoramaPortableLegacy, and the main one with an AppID like PanoramaPortable. That way you don't need to do any custom coding, and are still able to support the XP version.
Yeah, I could do that. Not elegant by any means but it's the simple way of doing things.
François
As Gord says, it would be possible with custom code, but I'd highly recommend against it. Doing 32 + 64-bit already doubles the size of the app. Adding a Windows XP released will triple it. That's quite a bit for an 80MB app. And that's a lot of space for a userbase that is falling pretty consistently. Worldwide, Windows XP is at 8% and falling. For visitors to our site, it's at 6% and falling.
It would also be worthwhile to see how much of a speed advantage the 64-bit version has over the 32-bit version. It may not have any. Most apps don't, but as this does some more processing CPU-wise, it may. If 64-bit has no advantage, then only including 32-bit would be the best option.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
From what I can tell, for smaller images the difference is negligible. But the 64 bit becomes handy when the stitched image becomes huge.
This program does a lot of computation to get things right and correcting for everything.
Since nobody I know ever used XP64, I'm going to keep things simple. One legacy 32 bit only and one for everything else with both versions.
That way I'll be able to get working on whatever machine I have access to.
François