The Myth about the weight losing Snow Leopard

posted June 24th, 2008

It seems that every news site speculates about the reasons for new leight weight Snow Leopard. I will list some:

1. No more PPC Code

All applications in Snow Leopard come as Universal Binaries. So does the kernel. Even if the “No more PPC code” rumor was true, it wouldn’t save enough to make Mail.app lose around 68% of 287MB. The Universal Binary only is 9.9MB in size. So even if the PPC code was 90%, it wouldn’t be enough to explain losing 196MB.

2. The “unneeded” language files are missing.

No, Snow Leopard still has all language files in their place.

3. Smaller Binaries.

Nothing has changed here. In fact, some apps have even bigger file sizes of the executable than before.

So, what has changed then? When you look in Mail.app you see that language files use up most of the disc space. Inside the language folder (e.g. “German.lproj”) are a lot of .nib files (the extension of Interface Builder). Inside normally are two files. One is a very small “keyedobjects.nib” and the other is very big “designable.nib” file.

When you open the Mail.app folder with “Show Package Contents”, navigating through the resources and open then a .nib file with Interface Builder you see everything the developer did when designing the application’s GUI. But all that changed with Snow Leopard. Now the “designable.nib” is gone. It seems like it had no reason other than to give hackers a chance to mess with the application’s UI design.

Posted in leopard, Snow Leopard |
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:17 pm and is filed under leopard, Snow Leopard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “The Myth about the weight losing Snow Leopard”

  1. Snow Leopard Mail.app to be two thirds smaller! | Hawk Wings Says:
    June 25th, 2008 at 11:22 am

    […] UPDATE: A list of the myths about the new light-weight Snow Leopard apps. In Mail.app’s case, the new slim-line is due to the removal of deisgnable.nibs in the app’s package. Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, leopard mail, localization, mail.app, resolution indendence, snow leopard […]

  2. Snow Leopard’s shrinking mail.app: Mystery solved | Hawk Wings Says:
    June 25th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

    […] In a post that details the various myths doing the round on the shrinking apps—no PPC code (false), smaller binaries (false!), missing language files (false!)—the writer spills the beans: When you look in Mail.app you see that language files use up most of the disc space. Inside the language folder (e.g. “German.lproj”) are a lot of .nib files (the extension of Interface Builder). Inside normally are two files. One is a very small “keyedobjects.nib” and the other is very big “designable.nib” file… Now the “designable.nib” is gone. It seems like it had no reason other than to give hackers a chance to mess with the application’s UI design. […]

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