Xslimmer 1.7 now available, fully compatible with Snow Leopard

Xslimmer 1.7 has just been released! It supports 64-bit binaries, honors code signing rules, is able to handle and create native HFS-compressed files and adds many other improvements that will continue to provide a worthwhile and reliable experience to Snow Leopard users (as well as to all others that choose not to upgrade to the latest OS yet). Read on for the gory details!

Universal Binaries are so 2008, aren't they?

Well, unfortunately they are not. Or, should we say, fortunately they are not. Universal Binaries were a key technology that allowed Apple to transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs in the most awesomely flawless technology adoption ever. The same Universal (or, as they are affectionately called, "fat") Binaries are being put to work again to ensure that Snow Leopard and its apps run flawlessly in all compatible Intel machines, including 32-bit and 64-bit ones.

So instead of packaging binaries in a bundle that contains PowerPC and Intel versions of the code, it will now become usual for developers to provide the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of the same code. The 64-bit version will be used in 64-bit computers, whereas the 32-bit code will run in CPUs that are not able to handle 64 bits. There is no magic way for the system to transform one into the other, so no matter what computer you have, chances are many of the apps you install will contain code that will be ignored and never will run.

But it gets more interesting! Snow Leopard is truly awesome, but there is no reason for developers not to support Leopard if they can. True, some apps will take advantage of Snow Leopard exclusive technologies such as Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL or some other new APIs; however, many others won't need these innovations yet and will still support Leopard. But Leopard does run on PowerPC machines, so developers should include a PowerPC version of the code if they want to support the same hardware requirements as the OS. As a result, we are starting to see applications that include not two, but three architectures: Intel 32, Intel 64 and PowerPC. This is the case for some very popular apps such as Tweetie for Mac or the latest version of Apple's own Airport Utility.

Xslimmer was designed to handle these situations, and it has now been tested and optimized for the scenarios above so it will always keep the best version of the code that is available for your Mac. If you own a 64-bit-ready Mac, then Xslimmer will preserve the 64-bit version of your applications' code - when it's available.

Won't Xslimmer break 64-bit applications? What about code-signing?

As discussed above, Xslimmer carefully analyzes your applications and selects the best possible architecture among those available. This is done in a per-application basis, and not following some batch process that blindly keeps a single combination. Analysis includes evaluation of signed resources: code-signing rules are fully honored so that only binaries that can be safely modified will be processed.

Extreme care is applied when slimming, and the operation is performed in the most friendly way. Your slimmed applications are registered again for you in the internal OS databases - your keychain authorizations are preserved, and you don't even need to restart your Mac after slimming it.

But Apple applications are already compressed!

Snow Leopard achieves significant space savings by using transparent file system compression. In fact, all system applications and utilities are installed in a compressed state, although they are transparently uncompressed on the fly without the user ever noticing. Xslimmer 1.7 recognizes and supports this type of compression: if a compressed application is slimmed, then it will be recompressed automatically. Therefore, all system applications in Snow Leopard will still benefit from additional space savings if they are slimmed, without affecting their compression status.

When running on Snow Leopard, Xslimmer will always show you the actual size your applications take up in your disk, and not the uncompressed size as reported by Finder and other tools. This way you can be absolutely sure about the savings you achieve.

We have even taken this technology a step forward. A new option in Xslimmer 1.7 will allow you to compress slimmed binaries that were not originally compressed. This way, your installed third party apps can also benefit from this awesome new HFS+ compression technology in Snow Leopard.

Ok, I'm sold - I'll give it a try!

Wonderful! We've always worked hard to prove that your choice of Xslimmer is really the best option for your slimming needs. In Xslimmer 1.7 you'll find many features designed to slim your Mac easily and with total peace of mind. These include:

Strip out unneeded localizations - As usual, Xslimmer 1.7 will remove translations you don't need, achieving great space savings.

Visual indication of architectures - Another new feature in Xslimmer 1.7, you can now see what architectures an app contains and what the resulting architecture is: Intel 32, Intel 64, PowerPC 32 or PowerPC 64.

Downloadable blacklist - for those apps that check themselves (for anti-piracy reasons, usually) and refuse to start after they have been slimmed. We test every report from other users about malfunctioning apps.

Your personal exclusion list - for folders in your disk that you don't ever want to mess with, for whatever reason.

Integrated backups - designed to let you test your slimmed apps with the confidence that you'll be able to recover them in one click.

Extreme compatibility - Xslimmer 1.7 has been fully optimized for Snow Leopard, but it will still run in Panther, Tiger and Leopard.

So, no matter whether you are a longtime Xslimmer fan or have come across it recently, now is an excellent time to check the combined space savings that Snow Leopard and Xslimmer will bring. We hope you like Xslimmer 1.7!

From Orange to Apple

Maybe the title should have been “From an Orange Executive to an Apple Indie Developer”, or simply put “Learnings After One Year as Indie”. Basically, I wanted to explain how I came to make one of the biggest changes in my life, what the motivations were, and some of the things I did learn throughout the process.

My background

So, at 39, I was a reasonably successful executive at Orange, the French telecommunications company owned by France Telecom. At that time, France Telecom had more than 200,000 employees, more than 3,000 of them in Spain. I was one of them, one of those called “Top 100”; a director in charge of Web operations, leading a group of nearly 50 people. I had a nice salary and nice benefits too.

I worked for Orange during 8 years. Prior to that, I had been working for other multinational companies, always related to technology, which was, and still is, my passion. That is also the reason why I majored in computer science. However, soon after I started working, it became clear that I could not make a living creating software, at least not the software that I wanted to make. Soon after that, I got a masters degree in business administration, and began a managerial career that some years later took me to Orange.

During my time at Orange, I started Cocoa development, a bit as a hobby. I had been developing applications, mostly games, since I was 14. Being new to the Mac, I wanted to see what Cocoa was about. At the same time, Pedro, who also worked for the same employer, had this idea about making a universal binary stripper. So he went ahead and made the first implementation of his idea as simple shell script. It worked just fine. We had been working together several years, and we knew each other quite well. When he showed it to me, I told him that I wanted to make it more “Mac-like”. I, then, created a user interface that showed the application list and an icon for the architecture. Finally, Pedro integrated the guts of his script into Cocoa. It was the birth of Xslimmer. To our surprise, Xslimmer's popularity began to grow, and with it, so did its sales.

Months later, around August 2007, we created Sketches. Those were the jailbreak days for us, as there was no official support from Apple for third party applications. Interest for it skyrocketed, and for every new update there were hundreds of thousands of downloads. Some months later, Apple announced the SDK and the App Store. It was clear that there was an opportunity.

The change and its motivations

So, my day job, family and other responsibilities were taking most of my time. I felt stressed, and drank a lot of coffee. I had a gut feeling that the time was coming to make a change. As opposed to what was clear to me in the early 90‘s, Xslimmer had taught me that it was possible to make a living on selling software that I had created. And the App Store was coming.

At that same time, Orange was starting to feel the pounding from the world's financial and economical crisis, and had bad forecasts for the future. As it had happened in several occasions before, and in preparation for the crisis, there was a management reshuffle. I was offered the IT Project Management Direction. The job was for sure interesting, but my head was somewhere else. I needed to pursue my dream of creating my own software company, one that would make software I wanted, and I knew that the time was then.

I left Orange, on July 4th, 2008. Exactly one week before the App Store went life.

The learnings

After one year there are a few things I have learned, that might deserve sharing:

App Store success is temporary. I compare it to the music industry. While you are on the top chart, you sell; once you are out, your sales level is much, much lower. In our case, Sketches did great for a couple of weeks, reaching Top 12 in the US for a while.

Apple listens, but it takes them a while to react. During the iPhone SDK beta testing, we wrote several bug reports - it sometimes took several weeks, but they were all answered to, and most fixed. Once the App Store was live, I wrote an article a while back that included several suggestions for improving the App Store. Most of the things that I wanted changed are now changed. For example, allowing only users of the application to voice an opinion and rating about it.

On marketing, experiment and follow your instinct. During this year we tried different things that did not work out. From joining other developers to create an “Apps Gems” site, to purchasing online advertisement. We were new to those types of actions. However, simpler, and cheaper, tactics did work out quite well. Twittering, blogging or simple press releases did much more than any expensive advertisement. I obviously need to learn more on this.

Get help for your paperwork. Administrative stuff and taxes is unavoidable. You just have to do it. We have a small accounting company that takes care of filling up the necessary forms and that keeps the accounting information for us, but most of the work, you still have to do. You have to process those PayPal reports, you have to process those iTunes Connect Financial reports, you have to scan all the invoices you receive, and so on. But having help from a third party places some routine to it, and ensures that you will meet the necessary deadlines.

It is not all fun, but automation helps. You cannot start new products all the time. You have to take care and nurture your existing products, so that your customers realize you actually take them seriously and are committed to making them better and better. Your customer base demands time too. Customer support takes a good chunk of your time. The more products and the more sales, the higher the number of customer support requests. I would say that around 2% of sales translate into customer support requests. Most are very simple, but some are not. The solution is to try to automate things as much as possible. From self service (recover your license) to email templates, all helps.

Working at home is harder than I thought it would be. This is not because of a lack of discipline, but, in my case, the environment is really noisy and busy during the day. I found myself trying to work while being interrupted. Being used to code at night, this was really hard for me. We ended up renting a small office, just a few days ago.

There are more things in life than just work. For a couple of months, I believed Pedro had lost interest in our little software start-up. One day he explained to me that he was ending his 15-year-old marriage. It took a while for him to reorient his life, and, as a result, we deviated from our scheduled workplan, and part of our initial inertia was lost. However, now I try to spend more quality time with my family, while keeping a more flexible philosophy about how to spend my time. For example, last week I took the afternoon off and spent it having fun with my family. What's more, I did not feel guilty or time pressured about it.

You can do all those things that you never could. Now there is no excuse. It is just a question of organizing yourself. In my case, I wanted to lose weight. That is hard to do when you spend a lot of time traveling around, eating sandwiches at meetings or while preparing presentations at 2AM. But once you are the owner of your time, it is. I lost 20Kg (44 pounds) from September to December last year.

The dream

So, now what? Well, when I think of what I want to accomplish in the future, I do not think of creating a huge company with many employees, controlling the world’s software market. My objective at this point in time is to create a company similar to Panic or the Omnigroup. These companies keep the indie spirit, while having some specialization and some size, so they produce quality products while providing a quality service, as their employees can dedicate most of the time to what they do best.

So, for LateNiteSoft 2.0, and if our numbers allow for it, my intention is to hire an enthusiast support/webmaster/marketing person, as the first non-founder employee. Then, where we go from there remains to be seen, but I am sure it is going to be both interesting and fun.

License delivery delays

EDIT: Everything seems to have gone back to normality now, and we are receiving PayPal events in a timely manner again. All licenses should be out now, please write to us if you haven't received yours yet.

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PayPal is undergoing a systems maintenance period today, and we are experiencing delays in receiving transaction data for Xslimmer and Snapshot. We will be processing licenses manually during this period, so they might take a little longer to reach you than usual. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

We'll post an update as soon as the service is fully restored, or follow us in Twitter for the latest news.

Server Up :)

We are glad to inform you that the issues with our Web server have been fixed, and it is back online. We are sorry for any inconveniences caused.

Dark Xslimmer's Toolbar

A few days back, I watched Cabel Sasser's C4 presentation. I thought it was a very nice presentation, with some insightful bits that can only be produced out of experience. I particularly enjoyed the part where he explains why they had to create their own toolbar. We had to do the same.

During the summer of 2007, Louie Mantia challenged us to produce a black themed version of Xslimmer. As Leopard approached, we were thinking that providing Xslimmer with face lift was a good idea. So, making Xslimmer black would made it look nicely different. At that time, it did sound as something simple: just make the grey areas of the window become black, and the black ink become white. Easy.

I started developing the window part. Fortunately, some people had walked that path before me. Making the window black was relatively easy. Using a background image for the window title + toolbar area was the only tricky part, as, in the beginning, it was not correctly rendered. The top half of the image was drawn in the bottom half of the toolbar, and viceversa. Fortunately, I discovered that setting something called "the pattern phase", within the graphics context, cured the wound. The black window was done.

Next step was to make the toolbar font white. I checked the documentation. Nothing. Checked Cocoa development sites. Nothing. Checked everywhere I could think off. Nothing. Asked other developers. Nada. How could it be? Similarly to the guys in Panic, who were fighting to get access the 3 bottom pixels of NSToolbar, we just wanted to draw white text with a bit of grey shadow, and make the black dotted lines, white dotted lines. That was all. I tried every hack possible, subclasses, all sort of undocumented stuff to try to get access to the text rendering part, so I could invert the colors. Nothing.

My first thought was: "I will just build the toolbar using Interface Builder". Then, I started to design how it would work and operate. I soon realized that it was not going to be an easy task. Not only would I had all sort of issues placing the different pieces of the toolbars, but also controlling them during run time. In addition, Xslimmer already used toolbars in 4 different places, so the code to manage them was already there and would need major rework.

I decided it was time to create our own toolbar management system, a system that would operate in the same fashion as Apple's, but that would provide the needed flexibility. This would allow us to not change the existing toolbar management code, and, at the same time, make the text color any color we wanted. It took a while, but it was fun, and the results paid up:

It was time to get other people's opinion. So, during our beta testing phase, we had a poll. Most of our users did not fully like the dark theme. We held several internal discussions and finally went back to a more "Leopard-like" look, the one that Xslimmer uses today. Given the fact that code for toolbar management was unchanged, rolling back was trivial.

So, at the end, we never used the newly developed toolbar system. At that time, Chris Messina suggested that there might be some interest out there in continuing its development, that we should open source it. To make the toolbar system open source would imply some work: I would have to extract the toolbar and window code, produce a sample application, etc. So, prior to making the effort, I was wondering: Would anyone be really interested?

There is Xslimmer in the Air (in the Macbook Air)

Since the Macbook Air was first presented at Macworld '08, we have had several people telling us that we should write about it. In particular, how Xslimmer is an ideal tool for it due to the small hard drive sizes. Faced with this kind of proposal, the question becomes what to exactly point out that it is not totally obvious. Xslimmer is a product to recover disk space from applications. The Macbook Air has a small hard drive. What else? As I do not know, I leave it there and point to you to some other people's articles:

* http://www.isights.org/2008/02/free-disk-space.html

* http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/31/unboxing-video-of-macbook-air-more-notes/

Enjoy!

Xslimmer 1.5 is Out!

It has taken us more than expected, but Xslimmer 1.5 is finally out.

Initially we intended to release this version along with Leopard, but we changed our strategy along the way. Feedback received from our testers and some difficulties in getting localizations recommended to dedicate some more time to this version. At the same time, we did not want to delay full Leopard compatibility, so we decided to add Leopard functionalities (code signing support, time machine exclusion, and others) to the 1.2 development line, while continuing to work on 1.5 at the same time.

Shortly after our initial Leopard-compatibility release we started to work on the preparation of the Christmas promotions we chose to take part in: MacUpdate bundle, and MacHeist II (as a loot for Mission 4). They both have been a success, and we have managed to get Xslimmer into the hands of many more customers.

The wait is now over. Thanks very much to all testers and to all our customers for your patience. We hope you enjoy this release, and that you see a lot of your suggestions covered by it.

Happy New Year!

From the Xslimmer Team, our best wishes for the new year that commences today.

Japanese Localization

We have the next release of Xslimmer ready to be delivered. We have been waiting for our localizers, who have diligently worked on the translations for French, Italian, Dutch and so on. For this next release we have included German. As each localization has been finished, we have prepared and tested the geometry to ensure that all localized versions of Xslimmer do look as good as the original English version. There is one missing, though.

Unfortunately, our Japanese translator is unable to comply with our request at this moment, so we need someone else to do the job of translating Xslimmer 1.5 to Japanese. If any of you are able to, or know of someone who could help us, we would be most grateful, and we could ensure a prompt release of Xslimmer 1.5. To contact us, use our web form. Many thanks!

Xslimmer is one year old

Xslimmer is one year old. During its first year of existence, Xslimmer has evolved a lot, and has gained quite a lot of friends. It has been downloaded, directly from our site, more than 150.000 times, we have answered more than 1.500 emails and a quite a few people have even bought the product.

It has been your support what has kept us coding, evolving Xslimmer. Your nice comments, suggestions, questions, purchases and even your demands have encouraged us to keep on working and trying to improve. We have put a lot of effort trying to make our software the best we possibly can, and it is really encouraging to see people realize it and appreciate it.

To all of you, thank you very much!

Xslimmer 1.2.6 is Out

Featuring support for 64-bit binaries in Leopard, we released a new version of Xslimmer yesterday. Xslimmer will now correctly recognize Universal Binaries that contain 64-bit code. It will keep the 64-bit version of the binary on 64-bit capable machines running Leopard, or the 32-bit version otherwise. In addition, non-Mac architectures are now correctly identified. The release notes are available in our download page.

If you use Time Machine, please exclude the Time Machine backup path in Xslimmer preferences. Even though Xslimmer will not slim Time Machine backup apps, it will analyze them when the Genie is launched, resulting in an overall performance decrease. To avoid this, simply exclude that TM path. A future Xslimmer release will automatically detect and exclude Time Machine folders.

This release is not to be confused with the one for which we are now in betatest period. We just borrowed some of its features, to ensure that Leopard was fully supported.

Enjoy Xslimmer and Leopard!

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.

Interested in testing the new Xslimmer?

We have finally pushed the Xslimmer version to a few testers. This is the start of the private beta.

We would like to add a few more people to the beta testing group. So, if you are interested in testing the new Xslimmer version, and want to help us in giving it the finishing touches by sending us your comments or bug reports, please contact us.

LateNiteSoft Recent Activity or, Xslimmer 1.3 is coming soon

It is been a while since the last Xslimmer release. You might be wondering if we are still working on it or not. We are.

You might not have noticed it, but during the last 9 months we have made 35 blacklist releases. With each release, we introduce one or more applications into the blacklist. This is a time consuming process, as we try to test each application blacklist request prior to committing it. Blacklists releases are normally silent, unless a user selects to manually update. Recently, we received a request to add release notes to the blacklist releases. We are considering adding this feature, but would like to do so without disturbing the user too much.

We have been fixing our issues with the email server. Some servers still consider our emails as spam, and having license files as attachments does not help. We did resolve the DNS issues. We need to work on the attachments. That is why we are now remodeling the way the license server works, so we can provide the license files as downloadable links. This will make it easier for everybody and should cause less anti-spam related problems.

We are also actively working in Xslimmer. We are working both on release 1.2.5, which shall introduce some bug-fixes and some functionality changes based on user's requests. In addition, we are working on version 1.3. For this version, we are introducing changes in the UI and some additional functionalities. Moving from a designer's mock-up to a fully functional application is always complex, and requires a lot of attention to detail, but we are getting there. We are expecting to start a small beta test in around 10 days.

I hope this gives you a feeling of what we are up to, but if you have doubts or suggestions, feel free to ask.

During and After WWDC

We are back from San Francisco. Wow! What an experience.

We started be finding the Moscone building and getting our badges for next day. Then we went to visit Cupertino. This is me in 1 Infinite Loop:



Next day we saw Steve's keynote and learned about how Mac OS X was evolving. During the next few days we learned about different topics. Everything was very well organized and presentations were generally very good. In addition, the opportunity to talk to the Apple engineers was very interesting.

But not everything was nerdy during those days. We met a lot of people, some of whom we only knew virtually (basically through IM). This is both of us with Brian Ball (MacZOT):



These are Sophie Teutschler (Coversutra), Stuff MC (Pomcast) and Pedro, with John Casasanta in the background:



Juan Alvarez and Mathew (Cha-ching):



Austin Sarner and friends:



Skitch's presentation at the Delicious Generation party:



Apple's party:



And we even had some time for touristing around:



Certainly a nice trip. We hope to repeat it next year!

LateNiteSoft at WWDC '07

I have started WWDC preparation. I have downloaded some of the headstarts, based on the sessions that interest me. Now, I have to install the latest Leopard preview in my laptop. For that, I need to go back to the repartition the hard drive once again. Lucky I did documented the first time!

I believe there are some very interesting technologies in Leopard. Core Animation being one of them. As I have been always interested in Special FX, game development and movie creation, it seems like a natural choice. So, once I get Leopard installed, along with the latest Xcode 3, I will take the material for Core Animation and try to grasp the basics before getting to San Francisco. I do have some ideas of things that would be nice to implement in Xslimmer, and even some ideas about possible new apps that we could create using Core Animation and other Leopard technologies. If I just had a more time...

Anyhow, I hope next week will be a fun one. I am really looking forward to meeting other Mac developers, whatever exciting news Steve Jobs provides us with, and all the possible learnings I can get.

If you are around, and would like to meet, let us know!

Spam, Alternative Email Addresses

Spam. It is ubiquitous. All around. In our case, we even get spam through the contact form of our website. Every single day. The issue is so big that practically all big email providers have added anti-spam measures. This allows users to get less spam, which is great, while still receiving genuine messages. That is normally the case. Unfortunately some providers must have such a big of problem, that at times they reject genuine messages too. What's worse, in some cases those messages don't even get to the user's spam folder.

In our case, we have had problems with customers with addresses from Hotmail/MSN and AOL. Messages to their users sent from our automated system were rejected. This meant that licenses were not getting to their legitimate owners in an automated way, and we had to resend them manually. In some cases, even the manually sent messages failed to reach the final users. So, we had to get Hotmail and AOL account to contact the users whose messages were not reaching them. Not ideal. If you were one of them, our apologies.

After investigation, we found out some of the rules that these providers use to reject email. We made several changes to the DNS configuration, and made several requests to our hosting provider. All these were intended to get our messages through. It seems like it is working fine now. We want to thank all the people who helped us detect this issue and resolve it.

Now, as spam is still going to be among us for a while, if you need to contact us for whatever reason, please provide us with an alternative email address. Particularly, if you buy Xslimmer and do not receive your license after a few minutes. Thank you!

Big thanks for all comments about Xslimmer 1.2.3

As you probably have seen, we have released Xslimmer 1.2.3 some days ago. We wanted to thank you on all the comments we received, both public and private, about the beta version.

We hope to have included the best options based on your comments. For example, we made sorting headers optional. They are accessible through the main window via the gear button. We also used the 1.2.2 icons for Stop and Clear, and definitely took out the dividers. You can check the full release notes here: http://www.xslimmer.com/download/.

We hope you keep enjoying Xslimmer.

Application Blacklisting

Recently we received an anonymous message requesting a new feature: Adding new apps to the public blacklist. In addition to this request, from time to time we receive email requests to blacklist this or that app.

Xslimmer has a feature already that helps us a lot in blacklisting apps. To use it, you should open the History window. It will show the list of applications you have slimmed down. Then, you can click on the "report icon" (exclamation mark) for the application, and this will open the "blacklist report" dialog:



After receiving a report, normally we test the app ourselves. It is not possible in 100% of the cases, but whenever it is we do. Then, we proceed to blacklist it with the information from the report, crediting the person who sent the report, if his/her name was included.

When an application is reported to us, it is marked as "excluded" or "privately blacklisted" in your preferences. That way, if you recover it from a backup or reinstall it, it won't be unwillingly slimmed again.

I hope this clarifies how our public blacklist is managed. Should you have any doubts, do not hesitate to ask. Thank you!

Xslimmer 1.2.3 Beta Updated / Design Poll

So far, no bugs have been detected, but we have updated Xslimmer 1.2.3 beta in order to reflect some suggestions from different testers, along with some other minor changes in Localization and blacklist. You can download it here: Xslimmer 1.2.3b3 download.

In addition, we would like to hear which of the following designs you prefer:

(Current Xslimmer, 1.2.2)

(Xslimmer 1.2.3 b2)

(Xslimmer 1.2.3 b3)

As you can see, the main change is the existance of the headers, which will allow sorting the apps by the criteria of your choice, including number of languages or architecture type, along with the existence of column dividers (which do not add any functionality itself). Any thoughts, really appreciated.