LateNiteSoft Releases Xslimmer 1.7

Xslimmer 1.7, the new release of the popular architecture and languages slimming tool, adopts and embraces several new technologies and conventions in Snow Leopard, thus continuing LateNiteSoft's tradition to provide the best anti-bloat application for Mac OS X.


Among its new features, Xslimmer sports the following notable ones:
Native file system compression. Snow Leopard achieves significant space savings by using transparent file system compression. All system applications and utilities bundled with Snow Leopard are installed in a compressed state, although they are transparently uncompressed on the fly without the user ever noticing. Xslimmer 1.7 recognizes and supports this type of compression: if a compressed application is slimmed, then it will be recompressed automatically. Therefore, all system applications in Snow Leopard will still benefit from additional space savings if they are slimmed, notwithstanding their compression status.

Optional compression of slimmed binaries. Using the new capability of the file system described above, Xslimmer can now optionally compress slimmed binary files, even if they were not originally compressed. Thus, installed third party apps can also benefit from this new technology in Snow Leopard. Only executable code will be compressed using this method - other application resources will be left untouched.


Accurate disk usage measure. When running on Snow Leopard, Xslimmer will always show the actual disk size taken up by applications, even if they take advantage of the new built-in file system compression sported by Snow Leopard. This way customers can be absolutely sure about the savings achieved. In contrast, Finder and other tools report the uncompressed size, which is the size applications would take when copied to another location.

Full support for Universal Binaries with multiple Intel architectures. Snow Leopard is not compatible with PowerPC Macs; however, Snow Leopard apps are usually distributed as Universal Binaries that contain 32-bit and 64-bit versions of their Intel code. In addition, developers that want to remain compatible with Leopard may incorporate a PowerPC version too. Xslimmer is prepared to deal with all these cases and will automatically select the best option for the system in a per-application basis, no matter how many versions of the code are bundled in an app.

Visual display of the slimmed architecture. Xslimmer will now show the architecture width of slimmed apps, making it straightforward to determine if an app has been slimmed to Intel 32, Intel 64, PowerPC 32 or PowerPC 64. Tweaks in other areas of the UI have also been added.

Xslimmer will now detect whether it is running from a read-only volume, such as a mounted .dmg file. Running in such a setting would prevent Xslimmer from authorizing its helper tool, which would result in failure to slim apps that require administration privileges to be modified. Xslimmer 1.7 detects this condition and offers to copy itself to the /Applications folder and relaunch.


Xslimmer is now available in Simplified Chinese. This is the 9th localization Xslimmer has been translated to. Others are: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Swedish.

The new features in Xslimmer 1.7 have been added with the same emphasis on safety and reliability that the product has shown since its initial release in 2006. In addition to the built-in backup mechanism, the downloadable blacklist or the personal exclusion list, Xslimmer takes special care to observe Mac OS X technologies in depth. Thus, slimmed apps will not have their signatures invalidated, will keep their keychain authorizations and will be registered in the system databases so other components are made aware of the changes and no reboots are needed after the process.

LateNiteSoft recommends Xslimmer 1.7 for all existing customers, and notes it is required in order to slim Snow Leopard systems. Customers that upgrade to Snow Leopard will therefore be able to achieve additional space savings on top of the size reduction already performed by the OS.


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