Power User Monday Tip of the Week

Zip It, Don't Stuff It

By: James Huff

Face it, Aladdin is losing ground. With 10.3, Apple has finally included core support for one of the most popular archive formats ever (ok, so they've always had core support, they've just implemented it into the Finder)! In case you haven't heard, the file extension is .zip .

How do you do this? Well, assuming you have 10.3, just right-click (control-click for you one-button mice people) on the file, and select "Create Archive of File Name". Congrats, you now have a .zip file that will work on all version of Mac OS, and Windows.

Ok, so you don't have 10.3, but you do have 10.2 or 10.1, then have a look at Mac OSX Encoding Plethora. It's basically a collection of Apple Scripts that will encode (and decode) your file in a variety of formats.

Well, I hope this week's tip will help you in your file transfer...err....file sharing...errr.....file swapping....jeez, all of these are 'bad words' now, aren't they? Well, I hope that this tip will help you in some legal way. Until next week, this is James, signing off....

Update: Jennifer Watson of Aladdin Systems would like to add:
"Yes, folks can choose to use Apple's Zip format, however, you'll still find for better compression and many more features and choices of compression in StuffIt, so it is still a better choice for power users and those sending/posting and accessing files frequently. Also, StuffIt does allow compression in to the zip format too. There are always those that don't pay for shareware, so this is another alternative for them. We're always looking at ways to speed up and we'll continue to do so. And, yes, I do think choice is good, that's why we offer both StuffIt and Zip...and a plethora of access types. "

While I feel that Stuffit is better compression, and offers a variety of formats, I still preffer Zip. It's fast, 100% cross-platform (resource forks are never cross-platfom), and easy to use (in 10.3). We're all entitled to our own opinions.   


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