XSlimmer

I found this little gem of an app called “XSlimmer”. Here’s what it does according to their website.

Xslimmer determines which code your machine needs and removes the rest. This is achieved by removing the code inside the Universal Binaries that does not fit with your machine’s architecture, a code that never gets executed and just wastes your disk space. In addition, Xslimmer eliminates unwanted application localizations. Normally you only use 1 or 2 of the languages in any app. Keep those and let Xslimmer eliminate the rest, recovering your precious disk space.

It works as advertised as you’ll see in the example images I have below.

As you can see from the picture on the right, the application gives you an idea of approximately how much it can slim-down an application you dump into it. In the screenshot you see that I put in mostly the CS3 stuff since those are the really heavyweight applications. You can set it to backup the original app, which I did in case the applications start to act funky because of the slimming operation.

I also had an app called Grand Perspective running – which shows a polygonal representation of the “space” which the files in my Applications folder take up. The biggest chuck you see there (which is partly covered by XSlimmer’s “SLIM” button) belongs to Adobe Acrobat.

In the next picture, you see a before and after shot of Grand Perspective showing the differences after applying the “slimming” process – notice that Adobe Acrobat has been considerably reduced. From that operation alone, about 800+ MB was recovered by deleting the unwanted/unused files. Here’s another picture, the interface of XSlimmer after it’s done with its magic.

After that run, I put a few more apps through it, and recovered more space. I guess from the CS3 apps alone and these few others, I easily gained back about a gig of space. You should try running the default Apple apps through it. You’d be surprised how much you can take off from apps such as iChat and iTunes. Mail.app seemed to show the most impressive slimming-down effect pegging at 8.2MB from a whopping 49.5MB. I’m still using it as we speak, and I don’t notice any negative effects from the “operation.”