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.

@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.

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