Comments on: Mac developer? Clean up your app

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:30:20 +0000

User Beware. Stripping debug symbols limits your effectiveness when making bug reports.

By: Ankur

Ankur — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:34:20 +0000

So how can I clean my WHOLE Mac at once?

If you want to do that, find the shell script 'trimmit' inside Trimmit.app/Contents/Resources (Download Trimmit). You can copy that out and use it. The only thing to be aware of is that you must provide FULL paths. That is, rather than Desktop, /Users/name/Desktop/. Example:

trimmit -dtrbs -a i386 -l En|en /Path/MyApp.app /Path/AnotherApp.app

d - delete junk t - compress tiffs r - remove resource forks / extended attributes b - keep backup copy (recommended) s - strip debug symbols

-a architecture and -l list of languages separated by "|" (en will match en and english, En will match English).

But please note I'm providing this information without any guarantees or liability. There's a high chance something will stuff up.

As for determining which apps might get messed up, there's also a list of apps that don't like being cleaned in the readme for Trimmit.app. However, you can only find out once you try to run them, but if you use the "-b" option to make a backup, that is guaranteed to still work as it did before.

By: Me2

Me2 — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 10:22:47 +0000

So how can I clean my WHOLE Mac at once (10.4.11) AND THEN discover the parts that hate the idea and wont work unless they are re-hired?

By: adriana

adriana — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:31:11 +0000

thank you so much for this article… its about time someone said this

By: Ankur

Ankur — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:22:26 +0000

Brant,

the user might take my app out of their /Applications folder and copy it to another computer.

Nope. The way I see it, if the user is able to ignore the main (universal) download link and find and download an architecture/language-specific build, they'll know what they've downloaded.

Which is why I said before that the main download link should be universal, but there should be at least an option for localized builds even if its (figuratively) hidden away somewhere.

By: Brant Sears

Brant Sears — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:49:30 +0000

One reason that we ship universal binaries is that in the back of my mind I think that the user might take my app out of their /Applications folder and copy it to another computer or onto a shared location for other users. I believe that users should be able to do this and not worry about the binary being stripped. If I thought disk space was so important that universal binaries should be stripped, then I would have an installer script do it. But disk space isn’t that scarce. My app’s executable is actually very small, but it is about twice the size of the Windows version. To me, its not a big deal. We have big disks today and this app is about the size of maybe 1 mp3 song. Uncompressed artwork, I do have sympathy for that argument.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:55:02 +0000

If everyone was still on dial up service with a 2400 baud modem this is stuff people would already be doing.

By: Harley

Harley — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 08:56:46 +0000

Nice work Ankur. You’re right about most Mac apps being bloated - I’ve saved at least a gigabyte with your fantastic trim-app script.

By: Ankur

Ankur — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:53:10 +0000

Xslimmer duplicated Resources directories!

Yeah, I thought that was quite a nice touch. Why embed just one framework when you can have three of each!

Xslimmer automatically copies itself to /Applications if you don’t put it there. Reboot and 6 MB are missing? Look in /Applications.

Wow, I didn’t notice that.

Lovely stuff… Get your five stars from Version Tracker. Who cares about quality?

Absolutely

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:09:31 +0000

Apropos: we finally took Xslimmer apart. I know we mention it somewhere but we never opened it up before. First we thought your estimate of 80%/4 MB bloat was a bit high but then we looked a second time: the dorks also duplicated Resources directories!

Just in case someone here isn’t following along: Xslimmer is supposed to slim your apps on disk - it’s supposed to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Yet when applying Xslimmer on itself it gets about 3 MB of the 4 MB we’ve found and misses an entire meg. And remember: this is Xslimmer running on itself. So the people who want to help you eliminate waste from your HDDs just dropped a 4 MB elephant do-do on you when you weren’t looking.

But here’s another thing that happens when you’re not looking: Xslimmer automatically copies itself to /Applications if you don’t put it there. Reboot and 6 MB are missing? Look in /Applications.

Lovely stuff.

This is another one that sells itself not on its performance but on its slick look and the look of the accompanying eponymous website.

Register a domain. For a single software product. Concentrate on the packaging, not on the performance. Maybe run some exclusive beta tests. Get your five stars from Version Tracker. The quality? Who cares about quality?