by As you may or may not know most Apple applications come with what’s called universal binaries. A universal binary is an application that contains files for various incarnations of the OS X operating system and chip architecture for example32 or 64-bit. Needless to say this takes up space especially if you are an SSD user.
Applications can also come with up to a dozen languages which can be handy, but more than likely you only need the one. Again this takes up much needed space on your hard drive.
Xslimmer removes anything in an application that’s not relevant to your system so basically it strips out unwanted files and languages from programs you might install. I well if it laughed when I first started to run this program I was waiting for it to break something but, after more than a week’s heavy usage, I can report that no applications have broken what so
We first run this application on the traditional heavyweight application that is iTunes and saw an incredible drop in the application size. ITunes dropped from 114mb to a paltry 32mb.
Feeling brave we then drag and drop Firefox into the application and again saw a sizeable decrease in file size.
So after a trial run a few applications we threw caution to the winds and use the built in Genie. This basically scans your hard drive for all applications and then report back on what can be slimmed and provide a report of savings. Xslimmer has the option to create a backup of the application before slimming so if you are a little tentative about slimming an application you can always roll back t ifo a fatter state
What startled us was the responsiveness of applications that have been slimmed some felt that they launched quicker. Although we have no way of testing launch times for application launch time it just feels snappier which to us is a good thing.
It’s now common practice for me to take a freshly installed application to to Xslimmer before even running it for the first time.
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