Nick Santilli over at The Apple Blog has been testing a little app called Xslimmer. This application will slim down Universal applications, pulling out the PowerPC code on an Intel machine and vice versa. Now, the space-saving benefits are somewhat insignificant, as what’s a few hundred megs in light of a 100 GB hard drive? But apparently Xslimmer has other benefits as well: it will actually speed up your applications.
Nick observed that after slimming down Firefox it launched and loaded several browser tabs much quicker than before. Similarly, Photoshop CS3 (a Universal application with PowerPC code) launched in roughly 5 seconds as compared to the 6-8 second launch time before its code-liposuction. To me, this sounds wonderful: I can speed up my apps (especially the big ones like CS3) and save a little hard disk space. Now the only question that lies before me is if its worth the $10 dent Xslimmer will put in my wallet?
for 10 bucks I can see the portable crowd flocking to this one to save a bit of drive space if nothing else.
then again.. anything that speeds PS is worth 10 bucks.
its sure worth $0, i got it from mac app a day :)
I was sure I'd seen something like this earlier... Hey, there you go: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050810112422666
I have not tested it my self, and if you do, remember to make a backup copy of your app first...
It's only worth paying $10 if you want a fancier intrface. Monolingual (link below) will remove various PPC or Intel architectures for free. It was originally written to strip away thousands upon thousands of localization files, so that disk utilities like TechTool Pro won't waste time checking the Finder attributed of the French iTunes help files. The architecture-removal capability was added shortly after the Intel Macs showed up.
I strongly recommend Monolingual: does more, costs nothing.
http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=monolingual&filename=Monolingual1.3.4.dmg&use_mirror=superb-east)
I'll have to second the Monolingual arguement. Not only can it uninstall all the unnecessary languages from your computer (It freed three or four gigs from my B&W G3), it can do what Xslimmer does.
Kind of hard to justify that $10 with a very worthwhile, maybe even necessary, app.