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Introducing Filemaker Runtime Shrinker

With our 2.9pr1 plugin we included the Filemaker Runtime Shrinker for Mac OS X. Download it on our prerelease plugin download page. This is a little tool which can shrink your Filemaker runtimes significantly.
The main window looks like this:

Left Filemaker 11, right Filemaker 12.

As you see we have 4 options:
  • First you can remove PPC code. As Filemaker does not even run on PowerPC based Macs, you can safely remove the old PPC code. It's not needed and we are not sure why Filemaker actually does include it in the first place.
  • Second, we remove duplicate libraries. Yes, the runtime contains a few shared libraries several times and it works fine if you remove the duplicates.
  • Third, there are some icon files in the runtime which are not assigned to file types, so the operation system will never use them. You can remove them easily with this option.
  • Finally you can reduce the number of languages you support.
When we click the shrink button with all options and leaving only one language, we get the runtime smaller and the result dialog:


As you see we save 95 MB (64%) for a Filemaker 11 runtime here and 85 MB (55%) for a Filemaker 12 runtime.

We already had questions for a Windows version. Filemaker runtimes on Windows include a lot of DLLs and all are required as far as we see. You still can yourself delete some localization files if you like. Also you don't need to include the Microsoft Runtime folders on Windows 7 as far as we see. Those libraries do ship with Windows 7, but please test that yourself.

Please give it a try and if you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask us.
if you want to share this news with friends, please point them to our website/blog so they can download the latest version. This app will probably need updates regularly for newer versions of Filemaker. And I hope Filemaker Inc is not upset with us providing this tool.
14 08 12 - 23:07