Review: Stuffit Deluxe 10
- Article 2 of 2
- MacAddict, April 2006
Allume Systems has had to work hard to make StuffIt a worthwhile app to buy; the result is StuffIt Deluxe 10, which builds on version 9’s already impressive list of features to provide an even more tempting package.
The top addition is a Spotlight plug-in for exposing the contents of StuffIt, Zip, and TAR files to Spotlight searches. Allume’s plug-in is more consistently effective than Ziplight (free, www.bartastechnologies.com), which lets Spotlight see Zip content, but StuffIt’s support for formats like TAR is what makes it invaluable.
StuffIt Deluxe also comes with useful Automator actions for including different compression and expansion formats in your workflows. A particularly nice touch is the ability to view thumbnails of images stored in SITX files, so you don’t need to decompress them just to see if they’re they contain the files you’re looking for.
There are other new features that Deluxe shares with the cheaper StuffIt Standard ($49.99). These include a compression system that Allume claims can reduce JPEG file sizes by 30 percent, improved .Mac support, and a better encryption system. We would have liked more focus on speed instead of some of these latter options, since StuffIt is still glacial compared to OS X’s multithreaded Zip compression.
The bottom line. Alas, all of these goodies are obscured by StuffIt Deluxe’s $79.95 price ($29.99 to upgrade). If it were less expensive, StuffIt Deluxe would be a more compelling tool; instead, this utility is a luxury that many Mac users can live without.