Snow Leopard Mail.app to be two thirds smaller!
UPDATE: A post today claims to explain it all.
According to a post on AppleInsider 
, the apps in Snow Leopard are going to be dramatically smaller and more efficient.
This weight-loss regime is prompted by the need to slim Mac OS X down for the growing number of mobile devices, so RoughlyDrafted (the source of the AppleInsider report) suggests.
As the graphic below demonstrates, the new apps are significantly smaller; Mail.app alone loses 196MB, over 68% of its current size:
Who would have thought that Mail.app had so much weight to lose?
According to AppleInsider some of the efficiency comes from a greater centralisation of resources in Snow Leopard:
Among the technologies believed to be aiding the downsizing are Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics with smaller vector graphics files, and Localization, which extracts the plethora of localized language files from each individual application and instills them into a centralized container accessible to each application.
Mail.app users can also look forward to more complete text handling features like auto word correction, smart dash insertion and more.
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Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, leopard mail, localization, mail.app, resolution indendence, snow leopard
June 25th, 2008 at 12:04 am
If the rumours about dropping PPC are true, that’ll reduce a lot of the bloat too—under Tiger, the PPC editions of Mac OS X were PPC-only, but the Intel editions were Universal. Under Leopard, everything’s Universal, and so rather large.
June 25th, 2008 at 12:47 am
I think one item that continually gets overlooked when people are reporting on the reduced file sizes is the lack of PPC code alongside the Intel code. Apart from the new underlying technologies, 10.6 is likely going to be 10.5 run through XSlimmer on a large scale.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:22 am
I am getting SO sick of people posting about how intel-only code saves all this space. It doesn’t. Besides, all the apps in Snow Leopard (as shown by all sorts of leaked screenshots) show that the applications, like Mail.app ARE universal.
If you dig into your copy of Mail.app right now, you will find that the binary for application is a whopping 5.7 MB. Where is all that other space? In the Resources directory containing all the image resources and localizations.
The space savings isn’t coming from stripping out PPC code – it’s coming from somewhere else…
June 25th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Not really hard to see where the fat is lost: just open the bundle and see that there are 16 language folders with around 15MB each. Not hard to slim it down to what you really need …
June 25th, 2008 at 2:17 am
This is pretty much total guesswork right now. Who is to say how localized the Mail application is right now in SnowLeopard? If you read the article, it talks about language files (which are all but about 2 MB of the size of the Mail application). So if the developer pre-release of SnowLeopard is missing a few languages, it’s going to be smaller. I really think the accuracy of this information at the moment on how big the mail application is going to be is about the same as me throwing darts after I’ve had 4 pints too many in an English pub.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Will this be an instance where Redmond will start its photo copiers?
June 25th, 2008 at 3:08 am
This is great news – especially for Mail, which has long been a memory muncher.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Perhaps they are now offering a way to more dynamically add language support. So your language preference is in the system preferences and then 10.6 can download just the language files for that language as needed. Right now apps ship with files for every language supported – it sucks. Assuming this is a resource available to developers too, it could be awesome.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I agree with Mo, it is clear that Snow Leopard will “lightweighted” because Apple will drop PPC definitely..