Filed under: Software, Leopard, Deals
BetterZip is a better zip
With zip support built into OS X a third-party compression utility has to bring something special to the table, and BetterZip does. Basically it allows you to open and inspect archives without expanding the whole thing first. This can be useful if you only want a few of the files that are compressed within an archive. It also does compression naturally, including encryption, splitting large archives, and stripping out Mac specific hidden files to make archives more cross-platform..BetterZip supports a bunch of formats which should cover just about anything you'll run into on the net: ZIP, SIT, TAR, GZip, BZip2, RAR, 7-Zip, CPIO, ARJ, LZH/LHA, JAR, WAR, CAB, ISO, CHM, RPM, DEB, NSIS, BIN, HQX, DD. Finally, the developer has also put together a great Quick Look plugin that supports most of the same formats.
BetterZip is normally $19.95 and a demo is available but as it happens it's on sale at MacUpdate Promo until Monday evening for half-off ($9.95)
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Eric said 2:49PM on 12-24-2007
The Unarchiver is way bettar. And open source.
http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html
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Fritz Laurel said 3:04PM on 12-24-2007
Dude, don't just say it's "way better." Give us reasons why it's "way better." Show us that you've actually reviewed the two programs and have results that qualify your conclusions.
And open source doesn't always = better.
Eric said 3:14PM on 12-24-2007
It's better because its free. duhh..
It also runs in the background like BOMArchiveHelper.app
Thats why it's better Fritz... Thats why.
John Coxon said 5:20PM on 12-24-2007
Open source doesn't make something better, and neither does the fact it's free. It makes it cheaper, sure, but not necessarily better. And also, when it's $10, it's as good as free anyway.
Eric said 5:56PM on 12-24-2007
I dunno about you guys but when I'm faced with a choice between two programs that do exactly the same thing except one is free and the other costs 10 dollars I'm going to choose the free one any day.
ClunkClunk said 1:27PM on 12-25-2007
While The Unarchiver is a great program it does not create compressed archives, it only decompresses. BetterZip does both.
Fernando said 3:04PM on 12-24-2007
The Unarchiver is a "better-er" zip!
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Think Adrian said 3:25PM on 12-24-2007
The Unarciver also has problems expanding split RARs...
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Rae Whitlock said 3:51PM on 12-24-2007
I vastly prefer BetterZip to the Unarchiver. It's the closest thing to WinZip/WinRAR that we have on the Mac right now.
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lark said 4:01PM on 12-24-2007
why the hell would I want to pay for something that does not support RAR?!
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John Coxon said 5:21PM on 12-24-2007
It does support RAR. It says that in the article.
Derek said 5:14PM on 12-24-2007
It sounds nice, but $20 sounds very overpriced. Also, Quick Look can expect .zip archives with a free plug-in.
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wavenumber said 7:22PM on 12-24-2007
The Unarchiver is just for decompressing as far as I know, BetterZip creates archives too. The plugin for Quick Look mentioned above was created by the author of BetterZip and made free by his generosity. It's indeed a good plugin. Concerning RAR, I think BetterZip requires an external program to create them (and the program costs an additional $30, if I'm not mistaken).
Pbryanw said 7:26PM on 12-24-2007
Well it's $10 for the next 5 hours, so not too badly priced if you buy it now. Also if you have the Betterzip quicklook plugin and Betterzip installed you can extract archived files from quicklook view.
The Betterzip quicklook plugin is free - you don't have to buy Betterzip to use it, plus it supports more formats then just zip so you can quicklook .tar files for example (and more).
wavenumber said 7:49PM on 12-24-2007
@Pbryanw: I don't think you can extract individual files from the Quick Look view, even with BetterZip installed. I think you can extract the whole archive in QL or extract individual files by launching BetterZip and picking them from there. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
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Pbryanw said 8:18PM on 12-24-2007
Ye, you're correct. When I said archived files I meant the whole archive. Individual files can't be unarchived using quicklook view. Maybe in a future release. Thanks for the correction.
Paul Bryan said 8:23PM on 12-24-2007
There should be a ? after future release. Original version makes it sound like I have something to do with the program - I don't - I just think it's a good piece of software.
jehan said 2:29PM on 12-25-2007
Well, if BetterZip can allow me to control where I'm unarchiving to, then it's in like Flynn. I'm willing to drop $10 to give it a shot. Plus, I'm having some troubles with the Unarchiver at the moment.
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sduba2271 said 4:30PM on 12-25-2007
How is this compared to Stuffit Deluxe? I know it's drastically cheaper than Stuffit Deluxe, but what about it's functionality?
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Peter Payne said 10:51PM on 12-25-2007
Sign me up for The Unarchiver. It has a "delete on finish" feature that's the only reason for using DropStuff/Unstuffit.
See it at
http://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/
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