Probably some of us already heard of architecture thinner such as XSlimmer. But maybe not everybody know that in Mac OS X there’s a UNIX utility called “ditto”–well at least in Tiger, I don’t know if the previous cats have it–that can be used to slim the fat universal binary just like those shareware. And because it came built-in in Mac OS X, yep, it’s totally free. To use it, just fire up Terminal and write “ditto” command like this:
To obtain the Intel binary:
ditto –arch i386 -Vv <Universal.app> <Intel.app>
To obtain the PowerPC binary:
ditto –arch ppc -Vv <Universal.app> <PowerPC.app>
Just change the names between the <> with your application and resulting application name. Oh by the way, it’s double dash before arch not a single dash.
Before trashing the original app to our trash, it might be wise to test the resulting app by opening it. If it run well just like the original ones, then we can safely trash the original and rename the resulting app–I hope. One of the applications that didn’t succeed, is Activity Monitor. When I try to open the Intel binary of Activity Monitor, it did a jump at the dock and then quit. It turned out that even XSlimmer blacklisted it from being slimmed. What a bummer.
But I accidentally found a way to work around this issue. It looks like some files or folders in “Activity Monitor.app” needs some special root permissions. Yep, try using “sudo” command before using “ditto”.
So, to slim Activity Monitor:
For Intel binary:
sudo ditto –arch i386 -Vv “Activity Monitor.app” <Intel.app>
For PowerPC binary:
sudo ditto –arch ppc -Vv “Activity Monitor.app” <PowerPC.app>
Just type your password when it asks, and Activity Monitor will be safely thinned.
Oh yeah, almost forgot. Because “ditto” behaves just like “cp” utility in scope of both utilities are basically copy files or folders from one location to another, the permission for slimmed application might not like the original ones. But don’t worry, all we have to do is just repair permissions using Disk Utility or any maintenance utility–my favorites are OnyX and Applejack.
Posted by Okky Hendriansyah Tri Firgantoro 
Posted by Okky Hendriansyah Tri Firgantoro 
Posted by Okky Hendriansyah Tri Firgantoro 
