There are times when you want to optimize your system, probably because you are starting to notice slowdowns or for the sake of saying “my OS is uber clean now”.
Whatever reason you are up to, you may want to check out Xslimmer.
Xslimmer is one of the utilities that can strip out unneeded files from your applications.
For example, before Snow Leopard we have seen what Universal binaries are.
A Universal binary (also called “fat binary”) contains code for two architectures: PPC and Intel, so, through Rosetta, a Mac OS X was able to run the code for the proper platform; the “problem” lies in the disk space usage.
Now we can see that universal binaries are expanded with other code: PowerPC, Intel, Intel 64, etc., along with language files; every bit of this stuff takes up disk space, and this is where Xslimmer comes into play, by stripping what your architecture/language doesn’t need.
It recovers valuable disk space and boost application startup.
Xslimmer have a built-in blacklist, which contains applications’ names that are dangerous to slim, so it will automatically skip them.
Be careful what you strip stuff in Snow Leopard though, and always make backups preferably on another disk, since there’s no point of having megabytes of backed up stuff lying on the same disk if your mission is to recover disk space, because when using the backup feature you are up to remove data from a source only to move it to another point on disk.
Another feature of Xslimmer is that it handles the new HFS+ compression introduced in Snow Leopard.
In Snow Leopard applications are in compressed state, decompressed on the fly when the user requests them.
There was a bug in version 1.7.1 that actually skipped the recompression, but, developers told me, was out only for one day.
The application does the job promised, and I can recommend it for curious, SSD or power users; however in those times disk space and performance is abundant, tampering with files this way can be not advisable on a critical platform, therefore always make a backup.
A word about performance before and after slimming applications: for me it starts to be noticeable on:
- slow computers
- starting up very big applications
Xslimmer features also a slick interface and support seems to be very cordial and fast.
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Hi Kain,
This is Pedro, one of the developers of Xslimmer. We fully understand your frustration with that bug, but I’d like to clarify a couple of points that we might have not explained properly.
First, the compression bug only affected Xslimmer 1.7.1, which was out for less than 24 hours. We fixed the problem and released a new version as soon as we detected the problem. Of course, this is no justification for having released a version with a bug, and we should have tested it more thoroughly. If you slimmed your apps with 1.7, you should be safe. In order to know what version you used, please use the “blacklist report feature” in the History window and we’ll check what version you used. The information is also contained in the History.plist file in your ~/Library/Application Support/Xslimmer folder.
In addition, Snow Leopard only applies the new file system compression feature to built-in apps. None of the apps you install later (or any other content) is compressed. Also, if you copy one of the built-in apps to another location for whatever reason, it is decompressed on the fly by the system, for compatibility reasons. Thus, if you used Xslimmer 1.7.1 instead of Xslimmer 1.7, the uncompression will have only affected the built-in apps. If that’s the case, please let us know and we will provide you a means to recompress them.
As disappointed as we are with having released a version with a bug, as far as we know Xslimmer is the only application that understands and deals with this new compression feature, and it required a considerable amount of effort to implement. Maybe we were a bit too eager to release Xslimmer 1.7.1, considering the complexities involved. We do apologize and will try to improve.
Thanks for voicing your concerns. If you write to us we’ll do every effort to determine whether you were affected by this problem, and to restore the original compression status of your bundled Snow Leopard apps.
Best regards,
Hi Pedro,
thanks for stopping by and offering support; I was surprised by this comment because I did a mistake, the review was marked as draft, however it appeared as published. That’s embarassing ;(
I already posted the final version and rectified things, especially the notice that the bug was affecting a version out only for one day.
I was hit by the bug, but for me was a minor concern as I wiped the installation anyway, but as a software developer too, I can tell you that I appreciate the support you are giving out to customers and it should be noticed that the bug wasn’t really a dealbreaker.
I was a bit frustrated at the moment as you probably read, but I also though that my judgements in my specific and probably isolated case, wasn’t enough of interest to put up in a review of a nice product.
Also I hope that is ok for you to publish the Xslimmer logo in this post, if not please let me know.
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Yes,
Thanks for the clarification Pedro, anyway i´ve had the same problem pulled up by Kain.
so, thanks again and i´d like have one´s … Xslimmer it´s a great tool.
Tschüß