VERY interesting. From the Get Info dialog, I removed all of Mail's languages except English. Then I ran a terminal script to remove all of the designable.nib files from Mail.app. My Mail app is now 14.3 MB, and works great. Impressive space savings. If Snow Leopard does some file compression as well, the file sizes could be significantly improved. I know disk space is cheap these days...but still, why take up all that space unnecessarily?
wow. i just did the same strategy for deleting localizations and cleared 1.3GB of space! amazing. i felt much more comfortable doing it via get info than monolingual.
How is this a mystery? It's been obvious all along that the apps in 10.6 are smaller due to getting rid of non-essential localization files (something many of us have already been doing for years). The fact that Snow Leopard is going to be Intel-only will also allow removal of PPC code. From what I've heard that hasn't been done yet in the developer preview, but no doubt it will shrink things down further.
How is this a mystery? It's been obvious all along that the apps in 10.6 are smaller due to getting rid of non-essential localization files (something many of us have already been doing for years). The fact that Snow Leopard is going to be Intel-only will also allow removal of PPC code. From what I've heard that hasn't been done yet in the developer preview, but no doubt it will shrink things down further.
Snow Leopard *may* be Intel only. May.
And, as discussed above, the actual binary executables are generally a small fraction of the total disk space used by an app.
Just deleting the superfluous language files in Leopard Safari 3.1.1 drops the package size from 60+ meg to 9.2 meg.
Also, same problem with Adobe apps. Don't use Monolingual. Adobe updaters stop mid-update if the original installation is modified. Only option is to reinstall from scratch.
exactly. this may be useful to save space on the iphone, but on computers? people use 500 GB HDs or much more. HD prices fall almost as fast as memory does. so if the apps are not faster that I doubt, this 'feature' does not make much difference.
exactly. this may be useful to save space on the iphone, but on computers? people use 500 GB HDs or much more. HD prices fall almost as fast as memory does. so if the apps are not faster that I doubt, this 'feature' does not make much difference.
It does when you move to solid state drives. Even if the drives were the same size, more open space = more space for rotating writes = longer drive life.
Leopard users tight on disk space can safely delete all of the designable.nib files stored within their apps and use a tool such as Monolingual or Northern Softworks Leopard Cache Cleaner to remove unused foreign language files, resulting in a free weight reduction without the wait.
Great article! Thanks for the reference to Monolingual or Leopard Cache Cleaner.
It's great to have an article which describes a problem, but goes the additional step of including the solution. Great work! Thanks to the author.
wow. i just did the same strategy for deleting localizations and cleared 1.3GB of space! amazing. i felt much more comfortable doing it via get info than monolingual.
Hi g.money. I have heard of get info ( I think), what is it exactly and does it remove all the localization files.
You suggest binary plists have to be decompressed. I'd say you're wrong, and that binary plists are probably faster than xml plists as they can be read straight in without going through a full XML parser.
It does when you move to solid state drives. Even if the drives were the same size, more open space = more space for rotating writes = longer drive life.
Is there any information on the life of flash memory. This is going to become very cogent in the near future. I am already holding a lot of pre-backup material on large capacity USB flash drives.
You seem to be saying it is only good for a certain number of wipes and rewrites. Exactly what sort of practical storage life do these thing have?
Well, this is not really revolutionery. In fact Xslimmer and few other applications already does this in Leopard. If you try that you'd be amazed by how much garbage you have dumped on your (paid) mac's hard drive space without ever knowing that,
I presumably have saved few GBs on my application volume.
Is there any information on the life of flash memory. This is going to become very cogent in the near future. I am already holding a lot of pre-backup material on large capacity USB flash drives.
You seem to be saying it is only good for a certain number of wipes and rewrites. Exactly what sort of practical storage life do these thing have?
With most flash memory it's said that each block can be written 100,000+ times. The memory uses wear levelling so that blocks are all 'worn down' at roughly the same speed. How that actually works in real life depends very much on the application. If you were to write backups to flash every day and fill up the card, in theory you'd be able to do that 100,000+ times. You may have issues if you write a lot of small files very often - flash has to blank an entire block each time it writes, so small files are inefficient in this sense as many unused bytes are 'worn down' even though they contained no data before.
To those of you deleting files randomly from your computer:
When you start to do things like remove .NIB files, extraneous language files, Power PC code, etc., you are likely breaking the ability for Apple Software Update to detect and install product updates.
After deleting these files, the applications that they are attached to are not longer recognizable, and can't be patched by ASU.
I'd say don't do it, unless you're prepared to manually check for and download the full installation packages for any OS updates from Apple.
I haven't tried myself, but I'd recommend caution in using Monolingual. Having read this topic I looked it up and came across a variety of warnings to use it only with caution or not at all (e.g. can totally break your system). You may want to update this post with a warning.
Comments
VERY interesting. From the Get Info dialog, I removed all of Mail's languages except English. Then I ran a terminal script to remove all of the designable.nib files from Mail.app. My Mail app is now 14.3 MB, and works great. Impressive space savings. If Snow Leopard does some file compression as well, the file sizes could be significantly improved. I know disk space is cheap these days...but still, why take up all that space unnecessarily?
wow. i just did the same strategy for deleting localizations and cleared 1.3GB of space! amazing. i felt much more comfortable doing it via get info than monolingual.
How is this a mystery? It's been obvious all along that the apps in 10.6 are smaller due to getting rid of non-essential localization files (something many of us have already been doing for years). The fact that Snow Leopard is going to be Intel-only will also allow removal of PPC code. From what I've heard that hasn't been done yet in the developer preview, but no doubt it will shrink things down further.
Snow Leopard *may* be Intel only. May.
And, as discussed above, the actual binary executables are generally a small fraction of the total disk space used by an app.
Further yes, but only a % point or few.
Now if only they'd do the same to the GUI. Starting with Finder, the Dock and Spotlight.
Also, same problem with Adobe apps. Don't use Monolingual. Adobe updaters stop mid-update if the original installation is modified. Only option is to reinstall from scratch.
so is smaller size mean faster running?
exactly. this may be useful to save space on the iphone, but on computers? people use 500 GB HDs or much more. HD prices fall almost as fast as memory does. so if the apps are not faster that I doubt, this 'feature' does not make much difference.
exactly. this may be useful to save space on the iphone, but on computers? people use 500 GB HDs or much more. HD prices fall almost as fast as memory does. so if the apps are not faster that I doubt, this 'feature' does not make much difference.
It does when you move to solid state drives. Even if the drives were the same size, more open space = more space for rotating writes = longer drive life.
Leopard users tight on disk space can safely delete all of the designable.nib files stored within their apps and use a tool such as Monolingual or Northern Softworks Leopard Cache Cleaner to remove unused foreign language files, resulting in a free weight reduction without the wait.
Great article! Thanks for the reference to Monolingual or Leopard Cache Cleaner.
It's great to have an article which describes a problem, but goes the additional step of including the solution. Great work! Thanks to the author.
wow. i just did the same strategy for deleting localizations and cleared 1.3GB of space! amazing. i felt much more comfortable doing it via get info than monolingual.
Hi g.money. I have heard of get info ( I think), what is it exactly and does it remove all the localization files.
It does when you move to solid state drives. Even if the drives were the same size, more open space = more space for rotating writes = longer drive life.
Is there any information on the life of flash memory. This is going to become very cogent in the near future. I am already holding a lot of pre-backup material on large capacity USB flash drives.
You seem to be saying it is only good for a certain number of wipes and rewrites. Exactly what sort of practical storage life do these thing have?
Make sure you dumped the files from your trash or they won't disappear and your restore may have been for nothing
They were deleted by the rm command, so I'm quite certain they're gone.
Well, this is not really revolutionery. In fact Xslimmer and few other applications already does this in Leopard. If you try that you'd be amazed by how much garbage you have dumped on your (paid) mac's hard drive space without ever knowing that,
I presumably have saved few GBs on my application volume.
Same here! XSlimmer rocks!
Is there any information on the life of flash memory. This is going to become very cogent in the near future. I am already holding a lot of pre-backup material on large capacity USB flash drives.
You seem to be saying it is only good for a certain number of wipes and rewrites. Exactly what sort of practical storage life do these thing have?
With most flash memory it's said that each block can be written 100,000+ times. The memory uses wear levelling so that blocks are all 'worn down' at roughly the same speed. How that actually works in real life depends very much on the application. If you were to write backups to flash every day and fill up the card, in theory you'd be able to do that 100,000+ times. You may have issues if you write a lot of small files very often - flash has to blank an entire block each time it writes, so small files are inefficient in this sense as many unused bytes are 'worn down' even though they contained no data before.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Limitations
When you start to do things like remove .NIB files, extraneous language files, Power PC code, etc., you are likely breaking the ability for Apple Software Update to detect and install product updates.
After deleting these files, the applications that they are attached to are not longer recognizable, and can't be patched by ASU.
I'd say don't do it, unless you're prepared to manually check for and download the full installation packages for any OS updates from Apple.
Info:
http://osx.iusethis.com/app/monolingual
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13031
sudo find / -iname "designable.nib" -exec rm "{}" \\;