SetApp has been around for a bit and is interesting. It takes a number of popular Mac Applications and bundles them in to a single inexpensive monthly subscription. Out of the gate some of the awesome applications are Ulysses and ForkLift 2.

But I have a great Markdown editor and I don’t see anything in ForkLift2 that’s more compelling than ForkLift1, which I already own.

So over the next bit I’ll be looking at a number of the applications that piqued my interested to see if SetApp is worth another subscription fee.

In my look at what’s in SetApp I wondered if it was going to be better to move from my set of terminal commands for squashing images to Squash. Which one would be faster? Which one would produce images that are good quality but smaller for delivery on the web?

The first test was with an image off Flickr. You can find the original here

With Squash it took around 2 seconds (I just counted in my head). The image went from 2.4mb to 640kb. So a good reduction and the new image is perfectly suitable for the web.

With jpegoptim used like jpegoptim --strip-all -t --max=70 *.jpg I couldn’t even count to 1. The image went from 2.4mb to 273kb.

So with a .jpg image, Squash was not the winner. Sure it was good, but not as fast nor did it squish images as small as the terminal jpegoptim command.

PNG Compression

To test a PNG I used the same original image above and saved it out as a PNG with Pixelmator. That got me a 6.1mb png image.

The terminal command for optipng I used was optipng -o7. Just like with jpg I left squash however it was set out of the box.

Using Squash it took about 40 seconds to tell me that it couldn’t squash the PNG any further.

Using iTerm it took 12:44:11 and the image size ended up at 6.1mb. Now terminal said it was a 16% decrease, but clearly it’s not enough to make the image suitable for the web.

Figuring that those two tests weren’t really great, I grabbed a random PNG from a client site. They both took under a second and turned the image from an already small 3kb to 2kb. Optipng said it took 818 bytes out of the image where Squash said it took 606 bytes out.

So is Squash Worth it?

Squash is interesting and I can see that someone that doesn’t feel comfortable with terminal using it. For me though, I don’t think it adds enough value to SetApp to add anything to the value in the monthly cost.

I’d install jpegoptim and optipng in your terminal and use those.

photo credit: clement127 cc