Review: Stuffit Deluxe 2009
- Article 60 of 89
- MacFormat, December 2008
It makes everything smaller – except its price
Ever since Smith Micro bought Stuffit Deluxe, innovation has been making the archive creation and management tool look better and better. Stuffit Deluxe 2009, able to handle everything from its own .sit and multi-featured .sitx formats through .zip, .rar and Internet faves .uu, .hqx and .bin, is undoubtedly the best yet, thanks to a variety of improvements.
The usual group of programs is still there, some with a makeover: Stuffit Archive Manager helps you locate, manage, view and decompress the archives on your hard drives using Spotlight; Expander is a simple tool for drag-and-drop expansion of archives, DropStuff for creating archives; MagicMenu and a contextual menu plug-in allows you to compress and expand archives without launching any programs; and SEA Maker lets you create archives that self-expand. There are other features, such as Automator plug-ins and command line tools, that help power users with their workflows, too.
New in 2009 for Leopard users is QuickLook integration, so you can see inside an archive’s contents in the Finder, Time Machine and Mail, for example, without having to expand it (although it didn’t seem to work so well with .rar archives). By installing Google’s free MacFuse, you can mount archives as disks in the Finder so that you can browse them, save to them and extract files from them as though they were a hard drive, although the interface isn’t instantly obvious.
You can now create different preferences for DropStuff with different drag zones so that you can drag files to different areas of DropStuff and have them compressed appropriately. There’s also support for scheduling compressed backups to your iDisk.
And if all of this cost £20 or £30, it would be easily worth it. But at $79.99 ($29.99 to upgrade), Stuffit is still going to be a luxury the vast majority of people can afford to be without.