Recovering Precious Disk Space With Xslimmer
Although Apple transitioned the Mac to Intel’s platform, there are still countless PowerPC based machines out there. From any Mac software developers’ point of view, releasing separate format applications to meet the need of both architectures does not make any financial or production sense. Thus Universal Binary or “fat binary” was born. Essentially, a UB application is a hybrid consisting of codes for both architectures in an unary package so that it can be installed seamlessly on both platforms.
The caveat is that the applications’ size becomes bloated. This is where Xslimmer, from LateNiteSoft, comes to the rescue. XSlimmer strips unneeded architecture codes from your applications and makes them launch faster, react snappier, and more importantly saves you a considerable amount of disk space, especially if you use a heavy-duty app like Aperture.
Upon launching Xslimmer, you are presented with a clean user interface ala AppZapper. You can drag & drop applications to it and Xslimmer will show the application’ current size and the projected space saved. You can also dump multiple applications if you want to or use the “plus” button on the bottom left corner. If you drop an application from a read-only volume, such as a dmg file or a CD, Xslimmer will install it to your default application folder and slim it down immediately for you – a definite time-saving feature. Xslimmer also provides a safety net feature by allowing you to optionally backup your applications before shrinking them to the destination folder of your choice – useful if you have an application that cannot be reinstalled for some reasons.
A nifty feature called “App Finder Genie” is especially useful when you run Xslimmer for the first time or have installed many applications since the last time you use Xslimmer. As its name implies, Xslimmer will scan your hard drive for any Universal Binary applications it can safely shrink. By default, any apps found in the /Developer, /System, and /Library directory is ignored. You can also add any folder containing apps you want to treat as private to a blacklist in preferences. Moreover, to prevent breaking certain applications, Xslimmer regularly updates its public blacklist of applications so you can be assured, applications that should not be slimmed down will be left alone.
Several new features are the ability to strip unneeded languages from your applications, letting you save even more disk space than ever before. You can also now easily mark your applications to the personal exclusion list. More localizations have been added, many immprovements to the user interface, and finally one that surely is in most people’s wishlist is the integration of Quicksilver making slimming down applications even easier and faster.
Another nice touch to Xslimmer is the history window. It lets you see what past applications you have shrinked, how much space you have saved so far, reveal applications’ location, the ability to report applications back to the Xslimmer team to evaluate if a problem is found, and to restore applications to their pre-slimmed states if you have enabled the backup option in the preferences.
I wholeheartedly recommend Xslimmer to anyone and I suspect many of you will like and use it a lot, just like I do. But don’t just take my words for it, very favorable reviews from Versiontracker and MacUpdate are testaments of how useful Xslimmer can be. For $11.95, it’s definitely a steal. But wait, there’s more. If you have tried Xslimmer, this is your opportunity to leave constructive positive and negative feedbacks to help the developers add, fix, and improve features that are important to you. Why? because they are giving away copies of Xslimmer to 2 lucky winners. So, what are you waiting for? Start slimming here
There’s something I don’t like about this… like if I want to burn an application onto a disk for my friend with a different processor architecture. I like keeping everything universal. Guess I’m not as tight about my HD space as everyone else.
TrimtheFat, which is free, seems to do the same thing.
Nice review, Yohannes! I’ve been really wary about using Xslimmer but you’ve quelled my fears.
I’m really amazed by some of the before and after affects achieved by using this. Google Earth is reduced by almost half, and lots of other applications receive significant shrinkage.
@Dave, the recently released build which also trims unneeded languages from your app saves even more precious hdd space as you mentioned. My aperture installation went down to such incredibly small size.
wow. an app that saves me things i didnt know i was wasting; neato. i like the blacklist idea alot.
id love if i could save the powerpc (in my case) trimmings in an img or dmg format so i could burn them, get them off a hard drive
I hate Xslimmer… i don’t know if it was a user error or what, but i slimmed a few apps and it completely reset them. I.E Wallet, address book and some others.
I think this is extremely useful to those who are on a laptop, where every hundred MBs is crucial. I use my MAAD copy quite a bit even though I’m on a iMac G5. The reason is that I actually feel that some apps go a tad faster after shrinking them.
I recently used this, and it saved me over a gig and some of my apps feel faster.
@Sherb, I do use both wallet & address book. They worked fine post-slimmed all along. I have not come across any problems with all of my shrinked applications. In any case, you are welcome to list the detail of your machine’s config for i have invited the developer to read the comments posted here.
I own the application, but I’d only save a measly 300MB by getting rid of the PPC code so I’ve just never bothered.
@Yohannes Wijaya: Hmm… i probably did something wrong
I don’t mean any offense, but the grammar and word choice in this post was horrible. Also, it was unnecessarily verbose. It reminded me of an student essay where the author did not know enough about the topic, so they tried to use “big words” to make the writing sound knowledgeable. For instance, “unary package” should have been replaced with “single package”, and “unneeded architecture codes” doesn’t make sense. Don’t try to talk like a developer when it’s quite obvious that isn’t that case. Again, I don’t mean any offense by this, just offering some constructive criticism.
Making Xslimmer default to removing all language files save one feels like a bad idea. I and my girlfriend share this computer, I want my UI in English, she prefers Swedish. Had I just run it without checking the preferences first it would have deleted the Swedish language files, meaning I would have had to sleep on the couch for a week. Perhaps not enabling this feature by default, or increasing the default number of languages kept, would be an idea?
@Jason, it’s called freedom of choice of words. I dont think unary is a pleonastic form of single in that context. How many more “big words” (or ’should’ i say bombastic/aggrandized words) you can find in the 621 words this article has besides those 2? I’m not a developer but i’m doing my master on cs, so i deal w/ “architecture codes” from time 2 time and despite english being my 3rd language, I believe I did a pretty decent job. If you read the article in its entirety, I “did know enough about the topic”. I believe you should instead channel your constructive feedback on the application being covered here as I have mentioned towards the end of the story. Should you pursue further “constructive criticsm” on my writing, it will be great if you can email me directly to yohannes.wijaya [at]gmail[dot]com from this point on. I will love to hear some tips from a fine native-english speaker like yourself. No offense as well and no offense was taken.
Wow, just saved my demo 50mb from Adobe, Adium & Address book. All functioning fine and faster now. What with EyeTV running on my macbook I run out of disk space pretty quickly, so this is very handy.
Xslimmer has saved me 851MB of “junk”. Stripping the unneeded languages allow you to save even more. Impressive. The quicksilver integration is indeed a real time-saver. Cant wait for the next release.
Disclaimer: I’m one of Xslimmer devs
@Andre: If you try the latest version (1.2.2 as of this writing), which allows you to remove localizations you don’t need, you will probably find a huge increase in the space you will save.
@Daniel: Actually, I have the same situation (I prefer English, my wife wants Spanish). We might consider an improvement about this. Anyway, in most cases English is also preserved, because it is usually the language most applications register as the “development localization”. The development language is a special one because it is a last resort location Mac OS X uses when it cannot find resources anywhere else. Some applications do rely on this defaulting mechanism, so it is dangerous to remove it.
Thanks for stopping by Pedro – good info. Nice to see you guys are active around the community
@Pedro, it’s nice to lend your voice here. Anyway, speaking of localization, it will be nice if one can select which language to keep {offering languages’ check boxes} instead of relying on the slider. Hence, for example, if i only want to keep english and korean, i have to choose all the languages, which is not very flexible.
The idea behind the Languages dialog in Xslimmer Preferences is to mimic your computer’s international settings as defined in your System Preferences. There are literally hundreds of language variants that can be configured in Mac OS X, and we didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of replicating the whole list inside Xslimmer. If the user has already stated what his language preferences are, what’s the point in making him choose again from a huge list? We opted to retrieve the preferred languages from the global system settings, and we believe that the ordering in this list will most frequently reflect the user language preferences properly. Following your example, if you wish to keep English and Korean, chances are that those languages are also the first two ones in your System Preferences.
If we accept that the global list in the System Preferences correctly reflects the user’s language preferences, then the use of a slider is the simplest way of telling Xslimmer that you want to keep your “n” most preferred languages. The alternative would imply that Xslimmer would need to store its own list of preferred languages, and the user would have to remember to change his preferences in both the system and Xslimmer when he wants to change his preference. The approach we followed allows the user to update his preferences in the same place he used before.
So, to sum it up, the concept is simply to state the _number_ of languages you want to keep. The languages actually preserved will be those that appear first in your system settings and are available in the application you are slimming down.
@Pedro, thanks for your comprehensive clarification on the localization.
[...] to the people who have posted helpful comments on last week’s Xslimmer article. Your feedback is very much appreciated and will be very helpful to the developers at LateNiteSoft. [...]
[...] It also has options for removing PPC or Intel architectures, similar to Xslimmer (Check out our XSlimmer review). So download Monolingual to reclaim your hard drive space. It’s a free universal binary, [...]