Every developer likes when his software executable has got the smallest possible size. If our executables are to big we can try to use Ultimate Packer for eXecutables (UPX) to get satisfactory results in making our application smaller.
UPX is a free, portable, extendable, high-performance executable packer for several different executable formats. It achieves an excellent compression ratio and offers very fast decompression. Your executables suffer no memory overhead or other drawbacks for most of the formats supported, because of in-place decompression.
For example the size of TwittMe application created in REALbasic is 6,579,344 bytes. When we use UPX and compress the executable we will have the same file but new, smaller size 3,592,706 bytes. Isn’t this great or what?
OK, so somebody can ask and what with memory usage of compressed file? TwittMe started without compression use 9.2 MB of RAM, and with compression 10.2 MB of RAM according information from Activity Monitor. This is only 1 MB of RAM more. Ask your self is it worth.
UPX is a command line tool and it’s very easy to use (upx -9 aplicationname). There are also some GUI for it available in Internet. You can search for iUPX (Mac OS) or UPX Tool (Windows). Of course you can make own GUI for UPX using REALbasic if you like.
REALbasic City is a part of TUTSPOLIS where you can find tutorials about creating cross-platform software for Mac, Windows and Linux using REALbasic 2009. Learn a object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language and create your own games and software such as browsers, periodic tables, catalogs for your
personal book library, e-mail clients, weather clients, instant messengers, unarchivers etc.
I have already seen it somethere…
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