TUAW's Daily Mac App: TinyExpander

Every Mac comes with a built-in file compression utility, but its decompression support is limited. We've featured a perennial favorite, the Unarchiver before on the Daily Mac App, but today we'll take a look at a new kid on the Mac App Store block, TinyExpander.

Just like the Unarchiver, TinyExpander is ready to expand whatever archive you throw at it. It'll handle over 25 different formats, with the highlights being Zip, 7z, RAR, TAR and XAR. TinyExpander is also able to extract encrypted archives, so it's pretty safe to say that it'll get the job done for almost any archive you're likely to have on a day-to-day basis, save for the really obscure formats.

There aren't many preferences to change in TinyExpander (as you can see above), but you can set archives to expand to a custom folder, should you want everything extracted to the same place. You can also change whether it'll trash the archive or not when it's finished extraction, and also whether it'll show you the results in a new Finder window. If you expand an archive to a folder that already exists, TinyExpander will give you the option to overwrite it or cancel your action, which should help make sure you don't accidentally overwrite something important.

TinyExpander is a great little utility that gets the job done without a fuss. If you're not enamoured with the Unarchiver, then the free TinyExpander is a worthy replacement.