Upgrade Price $29.95; regular price $80.
Reviewed by Avrum Lapin
StuffIt has been the de-facto file compression technique for Mac's almost as long as there have been Mac's. Many Mac's come with StuffIt Expander, a free sub-set of StuffIt DeLuxe, which allows you to expand compressed files.
People who grew up with 800 KB floppies and 20 MB hard drives may wonder why bother compressing files when you have multi Gigabit hard drives, Zip disks etc. One reason is the desire to send long files over the internet. We have all waited impatiently while someone's compressed multi- MB long file came in as an attachment. Would we put up waiting for a file twice as long?
I've been playing with StuffIt Deluxe 6.0 on my new iMac and it is certainly is a lot more convenient to use than the StuffIt Deluxe 3.6 that I used to use on my 68K Quadra (note that you need at least a PPC Mac with OS 8.1 or better to use StuffIt Deluxe 6.0). The manual is excellent (I understood it) even if it is a .pdf file.
StuffIt DeLuxe 6.0 offers some new features:
- Archive Search - Quickly allows you to search and find items within StuffIt archives
- Return Receipt Technology - When the compressed or encoded file you send is successfully opened at the other end, you get a receipt in your email confirming that your recipient has received and opened your file. Eliminates the need to phone and ask
- Greater Performance - processes StuffIt (.sit, .sea), Zip (.zip), Bzip (.bzip), BinHex (.hqx), MacBinary (.bin), UUencode (.uu, .uue, .U), Gzip (.gz), Tape Archive Format (.tar, .tgz), .arc, Compact Pro (.cpt), DiskDoubler (.dd), .lha, .rar, MIME (.mim, .mime), AppleLink (.pkg), Unix Compress (.Z, .taz), Private File (.pf) all with one drag and drop. No need to rejoin segments, deBIN and decompress as separate operations
- Smart Contextual Menus
- Recovers data from some damaged files
- Creates password-protected archives
- For communicating with your kids with PC's (couldn't you train them
better) StuffIt DeLuxe 6.0:
* Creates self-extracting archives for Windows (.exe) from your Mac.
* Creates StuffIt or Zip files to send to Windows users.
* Creates multiple format options, including popular Windows formats
- StuffItCM provides easy access to StuffIt archive contents via the Macintosh Contextual Menu, allowing more ways to retrieve specific items within a compressed archive.
- Magic Tools -"Get More Info" on files, "Copy or Move" files to any location with a single command, "Make Aliases" of files in any location, or "Gather" a group of selected files into one folder.
* Secure Delete allows you to permanently and completely remove sensitive information by securely deleting it once and for all!!
System Requirements
StuffIt Deluxe 6.0 requires a PowerPC Macintosh with Mac OS 8.1 or greater,
6 MB of available RAM and 15 MB of hard disk space. StuffIt Deluxe 6.0 also
works with Mac OS X Public Beta.