app that shrinks apps?

You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Some remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.

These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. Some of these apps delete caches, which can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.

Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.

Five Mac maintenance myths

 

Duff-Man says....perhaps what you were thinking of was XSlimmer- it will delete unused languages, strip out old PPC code etc. If used *carefully* you will recover some space, but it's not really as useful as it once was since there are getting to be fewer and fewer "universal" apps these days and everything going to "intel only"....oh yeah!

 

Pretty much the same kind of app is Monolingual.

 

Monolingual is a bit different in that it only cleans out languages whereas XSlimmer cleans out PPC code. They both give you free space though, and I've used XSlimmer for a few apps and it definitely helps.

 

You haven't told us yet, how much of the space your applications take.
Is it that much?

On my 60 GB SSD in my iMac the Applications folder is a whopping 17 GB, due to several instances of Chess and the like.
On my 120 GB SSD in my MBP (with an extra 500 GB HDD in there too), the Applications folder is 14 GB big.
The 60 GB SSD has 15 GB free, the 120 GB SSD has 40 GB free.

 

That's not true. Monolingual removes PPC architectures, as well.

 

Actually, don't see any reason to use such kind of applications - I have MacBook with 64Gb SSD, and applications take less than 1Gb of space. You'd better remove some songs/videos, than using these applications.

 

While many users of Mac OS X don't have that big of an Applications folder, some others (see post #8) have bigger Applications folders.

 

Keep in mind there's no PPC code in Lion, so that's pretty much a dead horse.

 

Some apps may still have PPC binaries though (if they are universal apps that run in previous versions of the OS). A Universal binary could have as many as 4 different binaries: 32-bit and 64-bit versions for both Intel and PPC.