Software development tools are often quite large and clunky, meaning that software developers often face the prospect of running out of hard drive disk space on their work machines.

I’m particularly fond of applications that use “treemaps” to visualize disk space usage, and have in the past mentioned how great Uderzo Software’s SpaceSniffer works when trying to figure out where and what to delete on a Windows machine. (If you are on Linux, then either KDirStat or QDirStat will do the trick!)

disk inventory x

Having to now publish Appcelerator apps to the Apple App Store for use on an iPad, I’ve been handed a MacBook Air (pretty little thing, but can’t say I’m a fan of the interface), and almost instantaneously ran into a space issue triggered by my installing of some development tools.

Naturally, completely new to the Apple environment, I had no idea where to even start looking for the most likely space hogging culprits!

Pleasingly, following a little time spent with good friend Mr. Google, I stumbled across Disk Inventory X, which bills itself as a disk usage utility for Mac OS X 10.3 (and later) and which uses treemaps to show the sizes of files and folders – in other words, exactly what I was looking for!

I downloaded and ran the software, and wouldn’t you know it – turns out that Android SDK had already pulled down more than 30GB of SDK related files.

Sigh, at least I now know where to start chopping…

Related Link: Disk Inventory X