Saturday, October 27, 2007

Xslimmer and Leopard

We are getting a good number of enquiries about Xslimmer's current version with Leopard. As far as we now, it should work fine: we have tested it out with all developer betas and it did.

Developers did not get the Leopard final build before the general public, so we are now in the process to test it thoroughly with the commercial release to see if there are any new issues we should cope with, although they are not anticipated so far.

On the other hand, apps in Leopard may contain additional architectures with 64-bit versions of the binaries in addition to the usual 32-bit versions. We are now beta testing a new Xslimmer release that is optimized for this situation. Hopefully, it will be released in a few days.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool guys, just got Leopard and it's a big beast, can't wait for a new release and keep up the good work :)

Al said...

Hi, I recently read this somewhere;

"Apple has also added application signing. Apple, and any developer that wants to participate, can affix a digital signature to their applications. Digital signatures are valuable because they certify both where an application came from and, more importantly, that it hasn't been modified. If a bad guy tries to subvert a signed application on your system, the modified application will no longer match its signature, and Mac OS X won't allow it to launch."

Is this going to be a problem for XSlimmer in the future when apps started getting digital signitures in Leopard?

Anonymous said...

Uh oh.

Does this mean that running Xslimmer on My leopard install removed the 64 bit versions of these apps?

Pedro said...

@anonymous

Most Apple and third party apps are still compiled as 32-bit Universal Binaries. In the Leopard distribution, the only 64-bit enabled application we have found so far is Chess.

Even though all system frameworks and libraries are 64-bit enabled, they are not modified by any version of Xslimmer in order to avoid problems that may arise when modifying lower-level components.

We are currently beta-testing the updated Xslimmer version we prepared after having installed the final Leopard release. It includes changes in the core slimming algorithm that we need to ensure are compatible with Panther, Tiger, Leopard; running on 32- and 64-bit PowerPC and Intel machines. Everything is looking good so far, but please bear with us a few days more!

Anonymous said...

Arriba! Xslimmer es de las mejores apps que he tenido instaladas en mi mac! Esperaremos ansiosos la nueva version, compatible con los binarios 64bits y con soporte total a Leopard.

Un saludo desde Barcelona :)

Anonymous said...

Great program, I used xslimmer a few days ago on leopard with no probs at all, But have i stripped all the apps down to 32bit :(

Jorge said...

@anonymous

Xslimmer might have removed the 64-bit code from your Chess.app; however, that is the only application we've found in the Leopard distribution that is compiled as a 64-bit Universal Binary. All your system frameworks, libraries and components are also 64-bit enabled, but Xslimmer should have not modified them in any fashion.

I'm very sorry you have experienced this problem. Developers were granted access to the commercial Leopard release at the same time as everybody else, so we had to defer the launch of a fully-compatible Leopard version until we had the opportunity to test it thoroughly in all sorts of machines running Panther, Tiger and Leopard, to ensure that the new code was reliable.

We have just released a 64-bit capable version tonight, but you seem to have run Xslimmer before that - otherwise, Activity Monitor would report Chess as a 64-bit application. If you did not configure Xslimmer to save backups, you could recover Chess using Pacifist from the Leopard disk.