I'm an oddball, I don't really like graphical interfaces when it comes
to archivers. Guess it's a hold over from my dos days.
I have rar, arj, zip, gzip, and even several older ones like arc, zoo,
lha, lzh and more. I'm somewhat of a packrat, and am always adding to
my collection of archivers. When I run across one with source, it's
all the better, since I compile it for osx, and linux, drop it on my
various systems, and have yet another format I can now convert to
modern formats.
As a result, I'm not really a fan of all these pay programs to do the
same thing I can do with free programs, especially since most source
is free in the first place. I do however, have one graphical archiver
program called the unarchiver. It integrates with finder, and will
uncompress nearly anything when I click on it. It's no longer being
supported, but sourceforge has the source, so anyone who wants to can
use it for just about any purpose. It handles all of my finder
archiving needs, and I've never run into a format I couldn't handle
either with the unarchiver or my command-line tools, and I've not paid
for any commercial solutions. I do currently hold legal registration
codes for arj and rar, but that's just supporting the authors, of
those formats, since those are the ones I use the most now, or in the
past. I don't mind paying for stuff I use, but I do begrudge paying
for functionality I already have, especially if it's something like a
bunch of apple scripts packaged into a stand-alone app, just for the
purpose of sale (which I've seen a number of times). I think folks
should be made aware of what they're buying, and if it's simply
packaged applescripts, they should know that. If they decide to
purchase anyway, because it suits their purposes, all the better and
no harm done, but it irks me to no end to pay funds for something just
to find out it's something I already have/could have built on my own
with an hour or so of effort.
Again, I know I'm an oddball, and drastically in the minority here,
but I honestly don't see the need to pay for programs that mimic
functionality I or osx already have, and unfortunately, there's a lot
of programs out there that are exactly that, copies of osx
functionality, albeit with different face on it, and in my opinion,
archiving programs fall into that category.
Of course, I've always been interested in archiving technology, and
have been collecting archive programs since the late 80s, so I'm not
your average user in that regard, and some folks of course prefer the
convenience of having things at their fingertips, and I understand
that completely, it's only the companies that sell supposed solutions
that don't add any value whatsoever to what already exists in osx and
call it progress that irritate me. Obviously, this program does more
than finder, with the hot keys and such, so I'm not referring to it
specifically, only to these sorts of things in general. I've seen
programs that cost 30 to 60 bucks that does nothing you can't already
do with osx built-in functionality, and that's where folks get taken
in, and I think it's a real shame.
Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now. Dunno if this helped anyone, but
if anyone wants any of my archiving programs, just let me know. the
unarchiver is available at google code (I thought it was on
sourceforge) which means of course you can download it for free. You
can find it at:
https://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/
Hope this helps.
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