Xslimmer & iPhone Apps: Free Up Some Space, Increase Performance

[skeredmobile]

So I was cleaning up my apps and getting back some wasted space from Xslimmer and decided to try it for my iPhone apps. And what do you know, it works!

For those of you who do not know what Xslimmer is/does:

"Xslimmer, the friendly way to right-size your apps without losing functionality.

* Remove unnecessary code from fat binaries. Xslimmer determines which code your machine needs and removes the rest. This is achieved by removing the code inside the Universal Binaries that does not fit with your machine's architecture, a code that never gets executed and just wastes your disk space.
* Strip out unneeded languages. Safari is available in more than a dozen languages, Adium in more than 20. This is great, but how many of those do you need? Xslimmer allows you to select how many languages you want to preserve in your apps and will remove the rest, recovering lots of precious free space from your disk.

Xslimmer not only frees space wasted by unused code, it can even increase your Mac's performance. Some of our users have reported applications loading in almost half the time, because OS X does not need to analyze Xslimmed applications in search for the most suitable version of the code. "

(xslimmer.com)


So I downloaded all my apps from my iPhone and reclaimed about 2MB of space and all apps work just as they did before, slimmed apps even load faster!

If you want to try it yourself, here are the steps I did:

1. Download and install Xslimmer (if you only want to use demo version, it allows up to 50MB which should def be enough)
2. SSH to your iPhone
3. Navigate to '/Applications/' and select ALL apps (read info on Installer.app first*) and download them into a folder on your desktop (or anywhere else). I called my folder 'iPhoneAppBackup'
4. After download, navigate to where you downloaded apps and copy the entire folder to another location (or rename the copied folder to something else). This is now your backup just in case something goes wrong (which it shouldnt but just in case)
5. Run Xslimmer and drag all your iPhone apps that on now on your Mac into the pane.
6. Let Xslimmer examine the apps and then click 'Slim!' in the bottom right hand corner
7. SSH back to your iPhone
8. Navigate to '/Applications/' and drag the newly slimmed down apps to your iPhone (overwrite all)
9. Power cycle your iPhone (turn off, turn back on)
10. Enjoy your apps just as you did before but now with more free space (and possibly faster load times).

Although yes I only freed up about 2MB of space, its better than nothing. Also, I only have 48 apps installed (including the stock apps) so people with more apps can probably reclaim more space. Also, I can definatley see improvements on the load times for my apps, esp the game apps.

The apps that were slimmed down in my case and still funciton 100% were:
- Calculator
- Customize
- iMemory
- Installer* (read below)
- Maps
- Mobileaddressbook
- Mobilecal
- Mobilemusicplayer
- Mobilenotes
- Mobilephone
- Mobilesafari
- Mobileslideshow
- Mobilesms
- Mobilestore
- Mobiletimer
- Preferences
- Snapture
- Twistedfingers
- Weather
- Youtube

*Installer info:
After you SSH Installer.app back to your iPhone it will give you a permission error. To fix this, do the following:

Use Terminal and enter the following commands:

chown -R root:wheel /Applications/Installer.app/
chmod 4755 /Applications/Installer.app/Installer

If you do not have Terminal on your iPhone, you can SSH to your iPhone within the Mac OSX Terminal app:

Open Terminal
type ssh root@(insert you ip address here)
Hit 'Return'
Type 'alpine' as password
Now type the above commands

After that, Installer worked perfectly.

Hope this helps, and dont forget to hit the 'Thanks' button