My friend Simon told me about a gem of a Mac OS X application tonight that I just had to tell you all about on this site. As most of you know, most Mac OS X binaries come in universal binary format to make sure they run on both Intel and PowerPC architectures. While this mechanism is absolutely great, it does lead to unnecessary large executables. This is where Xslimmer comes into play.

Xslimmer dramatically reduces the size of your Mac OS X binaries by stripping out everything you don't need on the CPU architecture you're using. Especially on the Intel platform this leads to dramatic gains in disk space. I gained a whopping 2.5GB of disk space by 'slimming' all my installed applications. Absolutely amazing!

Xslimmer is a very simple application that does only one thing: trimming down the size of your universal binaries. You can choose to trim down architecture specific components you don't need or language specific components you're not using. Of course you can choose to strip both at the same time as well. In fact, this is the default which is fine for most of us.

Xslimmer doing it's magic stuff

As mentioned before, I gained a whopping 2.5GB in total on all my installed applications. That's quite amazing if you ask me. Most apps shrink at least 50% in size. Some are even crazier. Safari went from a bulky 21.6MB to only 3.94MB. Madness! And if you think this is already amazing there's more worth mention about this great little application.

Not only did the size of all applications decrease dramatically, slimmed down applications also launched a whole lot faster than they did before their magic diet. I must honestly admit I haven't performed actual timings but I can safely say that everything feels a lot snappier than it did before. Just to give you an example, Photoshop CS3 now launches in less than 10 seconds on my MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz Core2Duo. Everything just feels more responsive and faster. An amazing improvement caused by a tiny little application that will set you back only $11,95.

I can wholeheartedly say that I feel Xslimmer is one of those must-have Mac OS X applications. Go download the trial version and let it convince you in a matter of minutes!