This new version of 32-bitCheck does everything that version 1.0 did, but it is now more user-friendly by running its scans in the background: no more spinning beachballs!

Other changes include:

• it displays a ‘busy spinner’ when scanning,
• errors in supplied folder paths are now reported properly,
• the Open File dialog is dismissed before starting a scan,
• the Help book has been updated.

Running scans in the background does come with a tradeoff. If you keep 32-bitCheck at the front and have little else active, scans will take much the same time as in version 1.0. If you run other CPU-intensive tasks at the same time, you may well find that scans take significantly longer. However, this version is far more friendly with those other tasks.

I have looked carefully at 32-bitCheck’s memory use. It is memory-hungry, because it performs a deep traversal of whichever folder you select. If you select the root / on a Mac with a lot of folders and files, it could even take more than an hour to complete, and use tens of GB of memory. That memory is, of course, virtual memory: you don’t need tens of GB of real memory to do that. If this worries you, the best solution is to scan smaller folders, say the top-level ones, one at a time, starting with /Applications.

There isn’t any straightforward way around this, but you should find that the app and macOS are up to whatever task you want, given a bit of time.

My next task is to look at command tools, which currently don’t get checked, because they are not code bundles.

32-bitCheck version 1.2 (latest release) is available from here: 32bitCheck12a
and from Downloads above.

Thanks to Brian S for encouraging me to improve this.