Comments on: Snow Leopard Mail.app to be two thirds smaller!

By: Hedi

Hedi — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:36:51 +0000

I agree with Mo, it is clear that Snow Leopard will “lightweighted” because Apple will drop PPC definitely..

By: roz

roz — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:43:11 +0000

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.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:08:51 +0000

This is great news - especially for Mail, which has long been a memory muncher.

By: Paul Greatbatch

Paul Greatbatch — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:36:47 +0000

Will this be an instance where Redmond will start its photo copiers?

By: John Jones

John Jones — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:17:10 +0000

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.

By: Guido

Guido — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:04:32 +0000

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 …

By: cjw

cjw — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:22:35 +0000

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…

By: n/a

n/a — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:47:43 +0000

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.

By: Mo

Mo — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:04:38 +0000

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.