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Trimmit: Snow Leopard Today
Review: Trimmit reduces footprint of applications on Mac OS X.
Apple has announced that the current focus for the next version of Mac OS X — “Snow Leopard” — is refinement, optimization and making it as light-weight as possible. As reported, most applications are significantly smaller in the Snow Leopard developer preview.
But you don’t have to wait for Snow Leopard to get that particular improvement — a free application called Trimmit can dramatically reduce the sizes of your current OS X applications today.
While setting up a new system, I decided to do some benchmarks and measurements to see what kind of difference Trimmit would make. Are the savings worthwhile? Do applications start faster or use less memory? Only one way to find out!
Trimmit’s Approach
What are the features that make Trimmit better than the alternatives? It optimizes application bundles — mostly doing stuff the developers should already have done — as well as removing unused languages and processor architectures. Specifically, it:
- Deletes junk files
- Clears resource forks
- Strips universal binaries
- Cleans out nibs
- Strips debug symbols
- Compresses TIFF images
- Removes unused languages
If this sounds familiar, you have probably seen other apps like Xslimmer and Monolingual that perform similar tasks. Trimmit outperforms them both — but isn’t quite as user friendly. A small price to pay — and irrelevant in practice, since you aren’t going to use it very often anyway.
The Results
What do the results look like? Quite spectacular. Popular apps like Mail, iChat and iCal end up a tenth of their original size.
The start-up time and memory usage from a freshly booted desktop for iPhoto, Mail and Safari before/after was also examined. There was no significant difference in memory usage nor in startup time — which is as expected, since OS X only loads the parts of the application it actually uses. So the savings only matter for disk space, not performance or memory.
| Application | Original size | Trimmed | Size reduction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Address Book | 55 MB | 4 MB | 93% |
| iCal | 94 MB | 10 MB | 89% |
| iChat | 114 MB | 11 MB | 90% |
| iTunes | 134 MB | 35 MB | 74% |
| 289 MB | 21 MB | 93% | |
| Safari | 66 MB | 7 MB | 89% |
| Preview | 18 MB | 10 MB | 44% |
| QuickTime | 29 MB | 7 MB | 76% |
| Pages | 266 MB | 171 MB | 36% |
| Numbers | 136 MB | 59 MB | 57% |
| Keynote | 283 MB | 150 MB | 47% |
| GarageBand | 180 MB | 63 MB | 65% |
| iPhoto | 178 MB | 53 MB | 70% |
| iWeb | 346 MB | 208 MB | 40% |
| TextMate | 30 MB | 25 MB | 17% |
| Google Earth | 111 MB | 61 MB | 45% |
| Opera | 34 MB | 15 MB | 56% |
These are just some commonly used apps — the savings are usually just as dramatic with other third-party software. And all those extra megabytes add up in the end.
Weight Loss Tips
- Not all apps can be trimmed: Adobe apps, Firefox, VLC, CSSEdit, Skype, and others won’t work if you trim them — consult the blacklist for a more comprehensive list.
- Always let it create a backup — it's the default setting — and make sure you test the newly slimmed version before you delete the original.
- Remember that you have to re-trim apps after they auto-update
- Trimmit performs significantly better than Xslimmer and Monolingual
Conclusion
Disk space is cheap these days, but there's really no reason that an application like Mail.app should take up 289 MB instead of a more reasonable 21 MB on your disk. Trimming your apps can easily free up an additional 2–5 gigabytes for your system in total, which definitely makes a difference for laptops with smaller hard disks like the MacBook Air.
Besides, how can you resist an application whose icon is Monty Python’s legendary Mr. Creosote?
