Do Mac Users Need To Stuff, Zip, Or Squeeze Files?

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 | What's New | Read or Post a Comment

Squeeze Five years is half an eternity in computer years. It seems like only yesterday that Mac users were all using Stuffit to store, archive, and send files to others.

Does anyone still use Stuffit, now at version 13? Mac OS X ushered in a generation of Unix zip capability, and archiving took a new direction. Disk images are all the rage these days.

What of Stuffit? It’s alive and presumably well and version 13 has more features than ever. The question for Mac users (and.... (excerpted).

4 Reader Comments

satcomer said:

I found the little Gem The Unarchiver. It will un-archive any file you throw at it. Plus it is free.

Ed Eastridge said:

The company I work for still finds itself telling customers to use StuffIt whenever possible. The reason behind this is that with the ubiquity of zip files and OS X’s ability to work with them, they’ve come to the conclusion that a zip file is a zip file is a… you get the picture.

Unfortunately when it comes to things such as postscript fonts, the end user can only zip from the OS X machine, whereas a lot of folks have a tendency to copy the files to their PC, given the aforementioned a zip is a…

Zipping Mac files on a non-Apple system is deadly to postscript fonts due to their resource forks which get stripped away on the PC end, unless software has been loaded to see resource forks and even then, zip still discards the resources because it’s not part that they recognize.

Now after rattling all of that off, it’s far easier to say, “Just StuffIt”. This way, 99 times out of 100, they’ll do it on the source Macintosh, not on a PC and things will come out properly on our end.

Of course we could also tell the customer to replace their Postscript fonts with their OpenType counterparts, but that gets really ugly, really quick as no one wants to spend any more money than they have to.

But for printing and service bureaus, StuffIt helps save a lot of headaches.

Mark said:

Occasionally I’ll receive a ZIP file that the MAC OS X built-in unarchiver chokes on. Each time, opening it with Stuffit Expander has done the trick.

Nick said:

Personally, I find that Stuffit files are a huge pain in the ass. I’ve got to download the file from Stuffit, which requires registration. Then I’ve got to install it, and then the (much larger than OS X’s built-in unarchiver) Stuffit archiver takes over the unzipping functions without my permission. I hate it with a passion. It’s like RealPlayer…useless software that’s required for a tiny percentage of the internet, that takes over your soul.

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