Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.
It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...
Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual
We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.
Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.
I am testing APP (just got my trial license) and every step of the pre-processing (from analysis to integration) takes forever
I have a quite fast MacBook air and all these processes take no time when I use other software such as Pixinsight. I also do stacking sometimes with my windows computer using DSS and the whole process takes 1 or 2 minutes at the most.
The other problem I noticed with APP is the time it takes for an image to refresh in the screen every time a change is made, sometimes is 30 seconds
I managed to complete the stacking of 1 image of only 27 subs and it took me almost 45 minutes.Â
Then when the stacked image is ready, the post-processing controls are quite challenging. Very minimal changes produce huge alterations and then the image takes time to reload
In general. I think the very detailed integration gives good results, but at the expense of a painful and long/time consuming process
I would appreciate some feedback on whether this issue will be resolved in the near future. what is been done and/or any suggestions from other users
Thank you
Alicia Rossiter
What version are you using? If you download the latest beta, you may get better results already. Is your Macbook M1 based? Because that will also make a difference in the beta. You can download it via the links on top of this forum, make sure to choose the correct one (M1 for M1 based CPU's and X86 for Intel).
Besides all that, the speed will depend on settings you have set and also what kind of algorithms APP is using, APP can do very nice calibration which makes mosaics an almost automatic experience, but the algorithm for calibration are more complex to make this possible and can be slower.
Thank you very much for the info, very helpful
I downloaded the beta version for my MacBook M1. It does seem to be a little bit faster. However, I had to force quit every program running in the background because of warning messages of lack of memory. This is new, I usually have several applications open (including PixInsight + Photoshop ) and never ran out of memory.
I still think APP is a good tool for stacking but the memory requirements and the speed need improvement
Thank you
There must be a problem with your system or configuration. Â I run APP on an M1 Mac Studio and it absolutely rips through integrations. Â I stacked 2 nights of Andromeda, 200 lights with master flats/dark flats/darks and bias frames in 25 minutes. All 20 M1 cores maxed out the full time, no memory pressure at all.Â
