Xslimmer is a discontinued application for
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ances ...
's
Mac OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
developed by LateNiteSoft.
The software is a utility to tweak
universal binaries by stripping the binary of either its
PowerPC
PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM ...
or
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...
code (depending on the system architecture used). This recovers hard disk space. Purportedly, the recovered space is significant. For example, according to the developers
Google Earth 4 shrinks from 101 MB to 52.8 MB (a 47% reduction).
The developer's stated goal of Xslimmer is to achieve size reduction without compromising functionality. As of version 1.2, the option to strip applications of unwanted language files and localizations is added.
Additional features for safe use that Apple's
lipo and
ditto command-line utilities don't have include a "blacklist" and a custom folder list (populated with key system locations by default). The blacklisted applications are those known not to work if stripped which generally only happens with copy-protected ones. This prevents applications (or the system itself) from becoming unable to work after the size reduction.
With the "App Finder Genie", a user can list all application candidates for size reduction and choose to slim them to recover hard disk space.
Performance
The mini-review of The Apple Blog states that
Photoshop CS3
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster ...
(Beta) now has “a solid 5-second launch time vs. the previous 6–8 seconds” on a 2 GHz
MacBook with 2 GB
RAM
Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to:
Animals
* A male sheep
* Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish
People
* Ram (given name)
* Ram (surname)
* Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director
* RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch
...
.
This was achieved after slimming the binary, restarting the computer, and reopening the application. Other applications may benefit from similar speed improvements. However, most of the Adobe Suite CS3 applications are now on the blacklist.
References
Xslimmer ReviewMyAppleStuff, December 7, 2006
Xslimmer ReviewGlenn Wolsey, November 1, 2006
Xslimmer's official site
External links
Official site
Utilities for macOS
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