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.

So, there are two posts on this blog but we haven’t really told you what this site is about. The primary goal is to provide a more detailed view on OS X and its (upcoming) features. We continue where the other sites stop. Besides that will discuss current security issues and exploits. For entertaining purpose we will also have some rants about Apple and OS X in general. Don’t get us wrong. We really like the Apple platform, but we want to give a different perspective on the whole Mac thing.

Just after christmas we will make a trip to berlin for the 23nd Chaos Communication Congress. There are a couple of Apple / OS X related lectures, like »Unlocking FileVault
- An analysis of Apple’s encrypted disk storage system« or »Software Protection and the TPM - The Mac OS X Story«. The latter is pretty interesting because the speaker, Amit Singh, recently published that Apple isn’t actually using the TPM chips which were built into the early Intel Macs. He also provides software to make use of the TPM chip so you could actually use it to store you personal keys. He closes his article, saying that Apple has even stopped building TPM chips into their computers. With his software and tutorial you can verify that yourself. Worth a read! Turns out Apple is not as keen about DRM as some keep claiming. So if you have no plans for the time right after christmas - this conference could be an option.

Mail us if you have something that’s worth investigating. If you have fun rants about your favorite OS X bug or missing feature - don’t hold back to start up that Mail.app and let us know.

PS: Someone wrote that our domain sounds awful. Well it was really hard to find a decent domain which had »mac« in it that wasn’t already taken. We don’t like it either - we’d be thankful for suggestions. As long as we don’t come up with something ourselves.