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Trimmit: Cheap 'n' Easy

Give a damn.

Get It

Try It

The situation is the following: Apple application bundles are meticulously packaged; third party application bundles are a mess. And why third party vendors don't pick up on this is anyone's guess.

It's not a question of packing universal binaries or extra localisation files - everyone has to do that. No - it's a question of packaging developer cruft from NIBs, header files from embedded frameworks, bloated TIFFs that weren't saved correctly, and debug rather than release executables. Apple developers wouldn't dare do it but 99 out of 100 third party vendors don't seem to give a damn. Today there are monster apps out there purporting to deal with this situation - but so far they're part of the problem rather than the solution.

Ankur Kothari of the Vacuous Virtuoso developers blog decided to do something about it.

'Too many apps are shipped with debug symbols, uncompressed images, redundant files, or generally useless rubbish that not only wastes users' disk space, it ultimately ends up increasing the developer's own bandwidth costs', writes Kothari.

'It's not just the script kiddies at fault', he continues and points out a few choice examples.

Path Finder weighs in at over 60 MB; after a few simple ops it's half that - just over 30 MB.
AppZapper trims from 3 MB to just 1 MB in a few seconds.
Xslimmer (ironically as it too is supposed to clean apps) is over 80% junk, going from 5 MB to a meagre 1 MB after being cleaned. The Xslimmer DMG is three times the size of the cleaned uncompressed app.

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

The joke is this extra junk doesn't do you one iota of good - it's just junk the vendors were too lazy to clean out.

And so Ankur created the shell script trim-app.

Command Line Virtues

Running a shell script is child's play: drop to a terminal window and type in its name. Takes a few seconds. And certainly at this site at least as much as at the rest one finds articles exposing the 'Wizards of OS X' who hide shell scripts behind illusory facades - and ask money for what should be free: knowledge.

But the issue here is to get people to use the script; and it's an undeniable fact that people will gravitate to a GUI based solution instead. Therefore Trimmit! - the GUI based version of trim-app. And one thing can be said after testing Trimmit: nothing could be easier. And as it's free nothing could be cheaper either.

All you do - literally - is drop your app on Trimmit. That's all. Maybe check your settings and then click the button.

That's it. Better go get Trimmit! now. It's not 2.9 MB as Xslimmer - it's only 72.9 KB complete.

It's already been trimmed.