trim-app

If you can't keep a tidy house hire professional cleaners.

Get It Try It

According to his blog Ankur Kothari is an almost 17 year old student. Veteran developers twice his age could do well to visit his blog and learn a few things from him.

'Too many apps ship with debug symbols, uncompressed images, redundant files, or generally useless rubbish that not only wastes users' disk space but ends up increasing the developers' own bandwidth costs', writes Kothari.

And it's not just the script kiddies at fault, he explains. 'Path Finder weighs in at over 60 MB on disk but after a few simple operations is halved in size to just over 30 MB. AppZapper can be trimmed from three megabytes to just one. 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.'

'Starting to see the trend? Almost every app can be cleaned up to save a good deal of space.'

Too Lame? Hire a Cleaner

It's almost too easy - especially for the lame - but Kothari made a partial solution.

'There is finally a tool that automates at least some of the cleaning process', announces Kothari who has an excellent shell script to prove it - trim-app.

'While it's written for cleaning out applications this script is also great for general tasks - cleaning out .DS_Store files in a certain folder for example', adds Kothari.

trim-app, says Kothari:

• 'Cleans out all the horrible .DS_Store files';
• 'Removes unnecessary info.nib, classes.nib, and data.dependency files from inside nibs';
• 'Strips fat universal binaries to contain code for a chosen architecture only'; and
• 'Eliminates debug symbols that may be left in your application'.

The download is only 1.4 KB. This is a script everyone should have.

See Also
Lipidity: trim-app
Lipidity: Clean up your app
Rixstep: Building and Packaging Native OS X Applications