10563

Provides: Compression, archiving, and protection of your files
Developer: Smith Micro Software
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4
Retail Price: New: $79.99, Upgrade: $29.99
Demo: 30 day trial

The big news with this version of StuffIt Deluxe is that it now is Universal. Besides this great addition, there are a few other new enhancements, but otherwise, when most long-time users open up this new version of StuffIt Deluxe, they may wonder, "Where's the beef?" as there are fewer items in the StuffIt folder than in past iterations. The sad story is that for a program that's been around as long as StuffIt has been, it's surprising how not fully developed this program seems to be.

We at Applelinks have been following StuffIt for some time, here's a link to my review of StuffIt 8, and here's Kirk Hiner's review of StuffIt 10.

Compression of items on a computer has been around for ages. Compression does more than simply decrease the size of an item, it also creates "archives." Archives make two (or more) items occupy one object. Thus, instead of sending 20 (sic) items via an email message, an archive is just one object—plus it's smaller than the 20 original items. Compression is basically a mechanism where the compression software takes another item and looks at its code. The compression software may look for areas where four "aaaa" in a row will be replaced by "4a." You've now reduced the code by 50%. Later, it will look at the code and wherever it sees "4a," the decompression software will replace that by "aaaa."

Items that are compressed take up less space on your hard drive, take less time to e-mail to your friends, and, as archives, make it easier to group collections of items together for storage and/or transmission via the net. Any time you've downloaded a zip, sit, sitx, tar, or even a dmg item from the net, you've benefited from compression software.

One of the built-in functions of OS X is the ability to create their own ZIP files (Control-click on a file, look for "Archive..."), but when it comes to control and range, nothing compares to StuffIt. StuffIt provides over 20 different types of compression formats, and you can compress JPEG images. This new ability has been around since StuffIt 10, but it's still a big deal. [The JPEG format, by itself, is a compression format. That is why you have different levels of compression potential when you save your images in your camera. The terms used can vary, but if there is an option on your camera to save your images in a manner that lets you save more or less images on your camera, that's compression. The bad news is that the greater the compression you set on your camera, the less quality your images will have. This is because the JPEG format is what's called a "lossy" format that drops pixels in it's goal to decrease the size of the image. The less the compression, the better the quality of the image, but the larger the size of the image. By using StuffIt's JPEG compression, you can select larger JPEG image sizes in your camera, but the JPEGs will take up less space on your computer. That's a win-win.

Installing StuffIt is simply a matter of starting up the .dmg file and dragging the StuffIt 11 folder to your Applications folder. Opening this folder, you see what comprises the new StuffIt 11, as seen below.

At this point, you are best off to double-click on the StuffIt Setup Assistant, a new application that initiates the instillation process. Once double-clicked, you will be asked for your name, serial number, and Administrative password. During the installing process, three items will be dropped into your Dock, as seen below (whether you want them or not): the StuffIt Expander, the DropStuff, and the StuffIt Archive Manager. Fortunately, like anything in the Dock, you can keep or toss as you wish.

Note: there was a bug in the StuffIt Contextual menu plugin in 11.0.2 that caused frequent Finder crashes when the user used Contextual menu activity in the Finder. There is an updater for this at the Smith Micro website (.zip file). To apply the patch, do the following:

1. Download the patch.
2. Unzip the StuffItCM.plugin.zip file that I am sending to you.
3. Go to your Mac's /Library/Contextual Menu Items folder.
4. Delete the existing StuffItCM.plugin file.
5. Insert the new StuffItCM.plugin file, that I am sending to you.
6. Log out then back in.

For long-time StuffIt Deluxe users, there will be a bit of a surprise when they go into the StuffIt folder this time around. The StuffIt Deluxe Application is now called the StuffIt Archive Manager. StuffIt Express PE, and Secure Delete have both been dropped, as has the Archive Search Application. Not to worry too much, as the functions of ArchiveSearch and StuffIt Deluxe have mostly been integrated into the StuffIt Archive Manager. Secure Delete is a sad loss.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the new StuffIt Deluxe is to break down each component program. First off there are the three (what I call) drop-action programs: DropStuff, StuffIt Expander, and StuffIt SEA Maker. Each of these—once set up to your liking—takes action when you drop a file onto its icon in the Dock. Once they are done with that task, they automatically quit.

DropStuff:

With DropStuff, whether sitting on your Desktop, your hard drive, or in the Dock, all you have to do is to drop any file, folder, or application onto the icon and it gets stuffed. If you double-click the application, it opens up into a flurry of potential preferences, as seen below.

Besides the destination slide-out, if you tap the More Options... button (on the flyout), you get more options. It doesn't end.

As can be seen above, you have complete total control of how the item gets stuffed, with what, and what happens to the final product and where it ends up. Surprisingly, what you cannot do is save any settings. Thus, if one minute you want to stuff a file and have it max out one CD and then segment to a 2nd CD, with Encoding, and other selections, and then want to do something else, you have to reset every option all over again if you want to repeat what you did some time earlier. Sadly, then, DropStuff is relegated to a specific setting that will only be used over and over. About the only way I can find this useful is for specific backup-type functions. That is, when you get certain types of files that you want to back up a specific way. For example, whenever you take a bunch of photos and want to back them up, you could drop the folder of that set of images onto DropStuff and it will be compressed/archived and burnt onto a CD. This action would be wholly different than a simple compression of an item that might be done to a file.

What would make DropStuff much more powerful is if you could save "Stuff" sets and select any one of them from the pop-up menu from the Dock. Then, drop your item on DropStuff in the Dock, and you're done. Alas, this option is not to be found in this version. Perhaps in the future.

StuffIt Expander:

As seen below, StuffIt Expander also has a reasonable collection of preferences. Unfortunately, like DropStuff, you cannot save any workspace. The Customize option lets you customize the menu bar. There are no other tools available for the menu bar, but you can select other options, such as Icon only or Text only.

The penalty of not having any ability to save "use" sets is that if one where to double-click StuffIt Expander, set the Destination preference for a specific folder for one particular type of file, unstuff the file into that specific location and then double-click StuffIt Expander for all of your other "UnStuffIt" operations, you'd have gained time to just expanded the file onto your desktop and placed it in your special location. This just isn't efficient.

StuffIt SEA Maker:

SEA stands for "Self Expanding Archive." It's useful for sending compressed files off to someone who may not have StuffIt, and thereby will not need to download it to access your file. The catch is that the collective size of an SEA can be greater than the size of the file prior to any compression. Thus, this is best used if you need to send an archive of files only if the final size of the compressed file is smaller than the size of the original file. You may have to experiment.

Also note that one of the options with SEA Maker is to create "Build Disk Image," which is used to create .dmg files. DMG files are those that create virtual Disk Images that one typically downloads from the net. The .dmg format is also a compression tool. To give you an idea of the size change that can take place, I grabbed a small folder on my hard drive that had a few items it it. This folder was 60 kb. After I ran it through the "Build Disk Image" engine in the SEA Maker, it was 5.1 MB. Once I mounted the Disk image and looked inside, the SEA contained therein was 12.2 MB.

What's most surprising (and disappointing) is that you cannot create a simple DMG without also adding the added bulk of the SEA components. By using the free Easy DMG, I was able to create a DMG of the same folder that was a simple 28 kb. [For comparison purposes, the same folder compressed in both .sit and .zip was 20 kb, and the .sitx gave a 16 kb archive.]

StuffIt Archive Assistant:

The StuffIt Archive Assistant is simply an archiving program that will compress your "stuff" as it archives. This can be done with or without encryption, and can even perform a verification after the Assistant is complete.

By default, the Archive Assistant is set to either get everything in your <user name> folder or any specific folder contained therein (e.g., your Music folder). In addition, you can add to this any specific folder on your hard drive. You can establish standard Finder "Find" limitations such as date criteria, name criteria, size, whatever. From here you can back up to any location you'd like, including any media type, and it even has ftp capabilities so you can send it off to a .mac account or any web location of your choosing (and capability). You can also set this up for automatic scheduling. What you can't seem to do is back up "now." That is, you can't back up when you are sitting there ready to do it. You can only back up if you've scheduled it for a specific day(s) of the week at a given time. While I applaud StuffIt's encouragement to do regular back-ups, it's also nice to "just do it" and get a back-up done. Especially since you can back up to DVDs and CDs, the lack of ability to do this when you are there sitting by your computer is rather strange.

StuffIt Archive Manager:

Now using the same icon as the previous StuffIt Deluxe is the new StuffIt Archive Manager. This component lets you see all of the archives you have for any given archive type. As seen below, any type of archive that can be created by StuffIt receives its own grouping. For any given archive type, you see all of that type you have on your computer in alphabetical order.

Supposedly, you can create your own custom Collection by setting locations and parameters of what you want in the location. However, I was unable to get this to work. I pointed the collection to a specific folder filled with previously made .sit archives, but it would only show one of the many archives in the folder. I could not seem to get this functionality to work.

If you click on any item, a "Reveal" button becomes active in the lower right corner allowing the file to show its Finder location.

What you can't seem to do with Archive Assistant is change the display order of the displayed archives to show them, for example, by date created. Again, a strange oversight.

If you click on the "Browse" icon (in the top left above), a new window pops up displaying the contents of that archive, when it was last modified, its non-compressed and compressed size and the amount of space saved. If you mouse-down on any item in an archive seen in the Browse window, you can drag that to your desktop and that one item will be unstuffed on the fly. If you keep your items compressed in large archives, this is a great way to extract single items for use without having to expand the entire archive.

The last (and best) feature of StuffIt Deluxe is Magic Menu. Once started, Magic Menu places a StuffIt icon in your menu, as seen below. If you have a file selected in the Finder, you can then go to the Magic Menu and select how you want the file Archived, Compressed, Encoded, Self-Extracted, whatever. In addition, with Magic Menu running, going to any file in the Finder and typing "Command-s" will cause the file to be compressed. If you go to any compressed file and type "Command-u" the file will unstuff. Similarly, as seen below, you can type out "Option-Command-1, 2, or 3" for the most common StuffIt types of compression.

Unabashedly, I love Magic Menu. I feel this by itself is worth the price of admission.

I've been a big fan of StuffIt Deluxe for more years than I care to admit. Unfortunately, beyond the advantage of this being a Universal build of StuffIt Deluxe, it's a surprisingly immature program for the eleventh version of a program. There is so much that could have been done to expand the functionality, but this didn't happen. I can always recommend StuffIt, but I do have a hard time to push this release if you do not have an Intel Mac and you do have a previous version.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.

Tags: Hot Topics ï News ï Reviews ï Utilities Reviews ï

Login † or † Register † †