Review: Stuffit Deluxe 11
- Article 29 of 89
- MacFormat, November 2006
It’s not bigger, it’s not better, but it is faster.
Who ate all the files? That’ll probably the reaction to any Stuffit Deluxe user who sees version 11. Smith Micro’s collection of archive creation and management tools, including old dependables DropStuff and Stuffit Expander, has had yet another update, and while there are some good features, what Smith giveth, it taketh away with the other hand.
Not only have Secure Delete, Archive Search, DropConvert and Stuffit Express PR disappeared, so have all the documentation, examples, plug-ins for other applications and Stuffit Deluxe itself. In their place is Stuffit Archive Manager (SAM), a new program that provides a variety of useful functions although not all the functions of those programs that have disappeared.
As well as the archive inspection capabilities of Stuffit Deluxe, SAM automatically locates standard archives on mounted disks using Spotlight. It can also use Spotlight to create “Collections”: these are groups of files that fit rules you set up, just like the various smart folders in the Finder, iTunes and iPhoto.
SAM is a Universal application and, like the rest of the suite, has a new Tiger-like but rather basic interface (there’s no “Get Info” or any useful information in the main window, such as archive location, except via tooltips). While SAM isn’t especially fast, mainly due to the limitations of Spotlight, the rest of the suite, including (thankfully) Magic Menu, do nip along pretty quickly on Mactels.
On the whole, while we found the ability to find and search through our archives almost instantly a great new feature, there haven’t been enough improvements elsewhere to make this feature worthwhile. For example, you still can’t modify most archives using SAM, typically only those created by Stuffit, not by OS X’s archiving function. Since SAM relies on Spotlight, much of the new functionality is achievable through the Finder, making Collections redundant for most people.
More importantly, the loss of features such as DropConvert and the lack of documentation are significantly detrimental to the product.
If you have an Intel Mac and have Stuffit Deluxe 10, the upgrade price is worth paying, just for the speed improvements. But as always, the full price with Stuffit Deluxe is just too much for what you’re getting.