What is the real utility of this software? - steve.uk1

Well i have a 60gb drive and theres only about 11gb free, 3gb of which came from using the program. I have not had any problems at all with my applications and trust it enogth to not bother with the backup archive (all my important documents, photos etc are backed up anyways.) As far as it speeding the applications up, I think it does speed up some but not by a lot. I would agree with you that if you dont need the space dont bother. But the app does what it says on the tin. :)

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Saturday, August 25 2007 @ 10:17 AM PDT

What is the real utility of this software? - TimPL

Look at it this way: you slim and backup an app. You'll know very quickly, if not immediately, if the slimmed version works as you'd expect. If it does, then delete the backup. If it doesn't then you've got an easy and quick way to restore it. If something does go wrong after you've deleted the backup, and which you failed to spot when checking, then you can always re-install from the dmg, CD or whatever.
I have used Xslimmer for ages now and have yet to suffer any problem whatsoever with any app. In fact, when installing a new app or upgrading an old one, then I drop it straight onto the Xslimmer interface and it installs / upgrades in one go. This app. can even slim itself. I wouldn't be without it and no, I don't work for the developer!
Tim.

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Saturday, August 25 2007 @ 11:34 AM PDT

What is the real utility of this software? - Greg_Weston_572

Some people running OS X have hard drives that are smaller than what the strictly need and not simple to replace (consider, for example, notebook users). For them, being able to recover even a single GB is a great win.

There is absolutely nothing to the idea that a trimmed app will run faster than the original. It's entirely placebo. For fat/thin binaries, the difference is literally a few cycles at launch and for single vs. multiple languages it'd be a couple of cycles any time a resource is loaded from disk (against the uniform performance hit of the disk access).

If this tool does what I think it does - wraps a couple of free command-line tools already on every stock OS X install in a nice GUI - there's no inherent danger from running it on normal apps. The only troublesome thing is the handful of app authors who check at runtime to see if their app has been modified and refuse to run if it has. You also wouldn't want to trim the system libraries on an Intel Mac because you'll lose support for running PPC apps.

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Sunday, August 26 2007 @ 05:33 AM PDT

What is the real utility of this software? - LateNiteSoft

Hi Greg,

Your explanation is great, I just have a couple of comments:

- Xslimmer won't deal with system libraries or frameworks. We understand the risks involved in modifying binary files, and that's why we chose to focus on the content inside application bundles. Moreover, the usual system locations are excluded by default, so *even applications* that reside there will be ignored, unless the user explicitly overrides this setting.

- The technical implementation is not based upon the command line tools you are referring to :) The core "slimming" code is written in pure C code. This gives us much more flexibility and a huge performance advantage. The first prototype we wrote was in fact a GUI wrapper over a Python script that drove a couple of command line tools - it worked, but it was around 20x slower than the current implementation. Oh, and it used many times the memory footprint.

- Some users have reported shortened launch times for slimmed applications, citing measures as scientific as the relative number of bounces in the dock :) My initial reaction was the same as yours, but we need to conduct some testing to make sure. We have tried to do so, but it is not as simple as we thought: you have to take into account complex OS features such as application databases (launch services daemon), several types of caching, pre-loading of shared code; and the behaviour of all these features in different versions of Mac OS X. Anyway, the reason why we wrote Xslimmer is to save space you don't need - I am one of those users constantly at a laptop, and I completely agree that a single GB can make a big difference some times.

Thanks for the comments!

--
Pedro
Xslimmer Team

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Wednesday, August 29 2007 @ 12:23 PM PDT

What is the real utility of this software? - gslusher

"What is the point of backing up slimmed applications?"

You should back up ALL your applications. Period. To do otherwise is to invite disaster. For example: an application is updated, you download and install the update, deleting the old version--and it doesn't work. Now, you're stuck, unless you have an archived copy of the older version (preferably the original installer or disk image file). You might be able to get the older version from the developer--but you might not or you may have to wait several days to months for a reply. Also, some applications can be downloaded only once or for a short time after you pay for them. After that, you'll have to pay to get a replacement.

One caveat: I wouldn't put applications on a regular backup list (e.g., Apple's Backup application). Instead, keep the installer or disk image file you downloaded or the original disk plus any updates that you know work. Store that somewhere OTHER THAN your main/internal hard drive. I put them on an external hard drive, then burn them to CDs/DVDs, for example.

BTW, Time Machine may not help. If you have to go back to an earlier version, you may also need to replace other files (e.g., in Application Support), which Time Machine doesn't know about. Instead, use the installer to un-install, then re-install, if possible.

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Monday, December 03 2007 @ 09:16 PM PST