http://www.mildmanneredindustries.com/baseline

Remeber it’s free.

What I like in Xslimmer and miss in Trimmit is the better interface and the wizard for finding/slimming more apps at the same time.

Trimmit is still beta.

Overall, Xslimmer is extremely intuitive and kind of fun to use, especially when you see some of the notable savings

I’ve found that Vacuous Virtuoso’s Trimmit does a much better job at removing bloat and recovering disk space. It also has a 100% failsafe backup system.

Sure. I notice the guy now says:

“I use both Power PC and Intel Macs and this caused issues as well when copying apps.”

Of course, if that’s if that’s your use-profile you don’t want to be stripping out architectures. Those who don’t need to move application bundles between machines with different architectures should be fine. Not “will be” but “should be” … there are exceptions. And do stay within limits. The same poster also mentions Monolingual, and says he doesn’t know if it was that that caused the problem. Possibly it was: on the Monolingual site they note:

“… you should not strip the System frameworks [on an Intel Mac] if you want to use Rosetta.”

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/faq.php

Quite so. Microsoft Office would, of course, be using Rosetta.

And as has been said, there are apps that don’t like having stuff removed. Adobe has already been mentioned. One suspects there could be issues with Skype, as that is known to check its integrity on launch (hence its problem with the Leopard firewall). I’ve also noticed that Pacifist will complain if it thinks it’s been corrupted, as it might do when being cleaned.

Bottom line: as Matt advised, make sure you have backups.

But there’s nothing wrong in itself with slimming down application bundles. It’s not second-guessing Apple. Apple itself makes a widget in the GUI available for removing languages. (See “Languages” on any application bundles “Get Info” panel — removing unwanted languages is what the “minus” sign is there for.) These apps merely automate the process.

And lipo is there on the command line, made available by Apple themselves, specifically for removing architectures.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/lipo.1.html

Applications like Monolingual, one imagines, remove architectures by making use of lipo.

I’d suggest this blog might also like to take a look at Ankur Kothari’s Trimmit:

http://lipidity.com/downloads/

Trimmit has a few other tricks up its sleeve. It looks for redundant files that are put there in the build process but are not supposed to be distributed. It checks whether a developer has used a “debug” build — again developers are not *supposed* to distribute debug builds but some are lazy enough, or uniformed enough, to do so. Trimmit can also apply lossless compression to tiff files. Mac apps tend to have a lot of tiffs in, and although Apple provides a utility at the command line for compressing tiffs not all developers use it.

It has saved me 4Gb in my Macbook. I am really happy with it.

I’ll keep tabs on everything and post any updates if necessary.

I use both Power PC and Intel Macs and this caused issues as well when copying apps.

I downloaded this version of Xslimmer and it seems to have gained some good features and improvements under the hood.

I think my advise should be modified to make a complete back up and remove only those items you surely do not need.

To steiner (#2) - it’s not a question of whether or not “Apple knows what it’s doing”. The reason these apps can be slimmed in inherent to the Universal Binary format introduced to support both Power PC and Intel Macs. There’s lot of extra code being installed on both types of systems that’s never used. Great for developers who want to support a wide base of users with both old and new hardware. In no way useful to end users once the application is installed. And I beg to differ. Saving 2GB of space on a 120GB hard drive is not inconsequential.

I’ve slimmed MS Office on four different systems with no issues. Not sure what languages you nuked that caused your problem and I’d be curious if you did that some time ago with an older version (Xslimmer is updated frequently and better sensitivity to language components was a fix a while back) and more importantly, whether you followed Matt’s very good advice to use the Backup feature so you could easily restore, rather than having to reinstall.

Xslimmer (ironically) is over 80% junk, going from 5 MB on disk to a meagre 1 MB after being cleaned. In this case, the disk image is three times as big as the cleaned, uncompressed app.

Be careful if this program removes architectures in any way in Leopard, this will ruin your system for sure and could brick your system. This is due to signed applications and the sandboxing and security features in leopard.

I am staying away from all these slimming pgms.

Apple knows what they are doing, most hard drives are fast enough and for the 200MB of space rather delete or move some of those old ripped movies that you are not watching any more. Or stip iTunes of half the library that you are not listening to anyways.

well that is my 2c, basically stay away from this app and others like it or it will cost you not only the license but a new system and at worst new hardware.