Mac Software 2
Dec 28 2008 05:47 PM Filed in: Apple
This post is a follow up to an earlier post where I
was detailing some of the applications I use
day-to-day on my Mac. This will be split among many
posts due to the number of applications.
Utility Applications (cont.)
XSlimmer has a tag line of ‘Your Mac on a diet’ and this describes it perfectly. XSlimmer has the sole purpose of analyzing an application and determining what can be stripped from the application to make the binary smaller. The way it does this is two fold. First, many applications these days are packaged as Universal Binaries. A Universal Binary is packaged to allow it to run either on an Intel Mac, or on the older PPC Mac platform. This is great because it allows you to not have to worry about finding the correct version of an application, but this also results in your application having a lot of unneeded baggage. The second thing XSlimmer looks at is all of the nationalization’s included with the application. A lot of the applications you download have resources for displaying the UI and all messages and dialogs in the language the user has set up on their machine. A lot of these applications have 18 or so languages, while 99% of the time they will only be used in one language. XSlimmer will get rid of all the unneeded languages and the unneeded platform code, which can significantly cut down the size of the application. I ran it on all of my applications and got back 2.5 GB of space. While hard drive space is cheap these days, it is nice to have it used for important things, instead of stuff that will never be used.
Price: $12.95
Here’s some results from XSlimmer on my machine:
Safari Web Browser started off at 67.1 MB and was slimmed to 8.47 MB, saving 58.6 MB in space.
Mail started off at 289 MB and was slimmed to 24.7 MB, saving 264 MB in space.
Screenshot:
WhatSize is a utility that is helpful at recovering space just like XSlimmer. WhatSize will analyze your machine and will show you the size of a given folder and subfolders within that folder. This will let you see in a glance what is taking up a lot of room on your machine. You may find lots of unused files or applications you totally forgot about that are wasting space. Price: $12.99
Screenshot:
AppZapper is an uninstaller for Mac OS X. One of the great things about the Mac is the drag-and-drop nature of installing and uninstalling applications. To install an application on a Mac you drag it to the Applications folder. To uninstall you drag it to the trash and delete it. The problem with the uninstall is that some applications don’t keep all of their files in the Applications folder, it may store things in a preference file or in a cache file that doesn’t get uninstalled. This is where AppZapper comes into play. You drag the application onto AppZapper and it will search your hard drive for any related files that can be deleted, then you zap the files and delete them. Price: $12.95 with free upgrades for life.
Screenshots:
KeyCue is one of those applications you may look at and go, why would I pay for something like that, but it’s worth it if you are like me and like to use keyboard shortcuts a lot, to stop yourself from having to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. I’m sure most people know the common keyboard shortcuts you use very often such as Command-C to Copy, Command-V to Paste and Command-Q to quit a program, but what about the more obscure less used commands? In Safari did you know you can use Command-D to bookmark a page, or do you use the mouse to click the bookmark menu item? Did you know if you are on a web page in Safari you can press Command-I and the page will be imported into Mail so you can e-mail it to someone? These are the kinds of things you learn with KeyCue. It’s really handy when you are a developer and you use something complicated like XCode or TextMate, which can have hundreds of commands available through key combinations. KeyCue is simple to use, while you are in an application you can hold down the Command key, and an overlay with a list of the commands will show. It is that easy, and extremely helpful. Price: $19.99
Screenshot:
That’s enough for this time. I realize that you may look at all of these applications and notice that some of them cost a lot. If you were to just add up the price of the applications in this post it would total close to $60. That’s why I tend to buy my applications in the occasional bundle promotion that is found on sites like MacZot, MUPromo and MacHeist. You can sometimes pick up $400+ of software for around $50. Plus MacZot and MUPromo have daily deals too on software. It’s good to keep a watch on these sites.
Utility Applications (cont.)
XSlimmer has a tag line of ‘Your Mac on a diet’ and this describes it perfectly. XSlimmer has the sole purpose of analyzing an application and determining what can be stripped from the application to make the binary smaller. The way it does this is two fold. First, many applications these days are packaged as Universal Binaries. A Universal Binary is packaged to allow it to run either on an Intel Mac, or on the older PPC Mac platform. This is great because it allows you to not have to worry about finding the correct version of an application, but this also results in your application having a lot of unneeded baggage. The second thing XSlimmer looks at is all of the nationalization’s included with the application. A lot of the applications you download have resources for displaying the UI and all messages and dialogs in the language the user has set up on their machine. A lot of these applications have 18 or so languages, while 99% of the time they will only be used in one language. XSlimmer will get rid of all the unneeded languages and the unneeded platform code, which can significantly cut down the size of the application. I ran it on all of my applications and got back 2.5 GB of space. While hard drive space is cheap these days, it is nice to have it used for important things, instead of stuff that will never be used.
Price: $12.95
Here’s some results from XSlimmer on my machine:
Safari Web Browser started off at 67.1 MB and was slimmed to 8.47 MB, saving 58.6 MB in space.
Mail started off at 289 MB and was slimmed to 24.7 MB, saving 264 MB in space.
Screenshot:
WhatSize is a utility that is helpful at recovering space just like XSlimmer. WhatSize will analyze your machine and will show you the size of a given folder and subfolders within that folder. This will let you see in a glance what is taking up a lot of room on your machine. You may find lots of unused files or applications you totally forgot about that are wasting space. Price: $12.99
Screenshot:
AppZapper is an uninstaller for Mac OS X. One of the great things about the Mac is the drag-and-drop nature of installing and uninstalling applications. To install an application on a Mac you drag it to the Applications folder. To uninstall you drag it to the trash and delete it. The problem with the uninstall is that some applications don’t keep all of their files in the Applications folder, it may store things in a preference file or in a cache file that doesn’t get uninstalled. This is where AppZapper comes into play. You drag the application onto AppZapper and it will search your hard drive for any related files that can be deleted, then you zap the files and delete them. Price: $12.95 with free upgrades for life.
Screenshots:
KeyCue is one of those applications you may look at and go, why would I pay for something like that, but it’s worth it if you are like me and like to use keyboard shortcuts a lot, to stop yourself from having to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. I’m sure most people know the common keyboard shortcuts you use very often such as Command-C to Copy, Command-V to Paste and Command-Q to quit a program, but what about the more obscure less used commands? In Safari did you know you can use Command-D to bookmark a page, or do you use the mouse to click the bookmark menu item? Did you know if you are on a web page in Safari you can press Command-I and the page will be imported into Mail so you can e-mail it to someone? These are the kinds of things you learn with KeyCue. It’s really handy when you are a developer and you use something complicated like XCode or TextMate, which can have hundreds of commands available through key combinations. KeyCue is simple to use, while you are in an application you can hold down the Command key, and an overlay with a list of the commands will show. It is that easy, and extremely helpful. Price: $19.99
Screenshot:
That’s enough for this time. I realize that you may look at all of these applications and notice that some of them cost a lot. If you were to just add up the price of the applications in this post it would total close to $60. That’s why I tend to buy my applications in the occasional bundle promotion that is found on sites like MacZot, MUPromo and MacHeist. You can sometimes pick up $400+ of software for around $50. Plus MacZot and MUPromo have daily deals too on software. It’s good to keep a watch on these sites.
|