StuffIt Deluxe 6.5

Rating:
Summary: The description is misleading.
Review: Amazon's description of the product is MAC os 9 and below. This product is only for OS 8 and 9. It will not work on 7.5. Wish I had known this before I purchased it.

Rating:
Summary: The description is misleading.
Review: Amazon's description of the product is MAC os 9 and below. This product is only for OS 8 and 9. It will not work on 7.5. Wish I had known this before I purchased it.

Rating:
Summary: A Must-Have for Mac users on the Internet
Review: If you send or receive attachments via e-mail and/or you download files from the web or newsgroups, you have got to have this package!

Aladdin Systems has been with the Mac OS from the very start--- since 1984 they have been providing file compression software for the Mac platform. Now that Stuffit is also available for all flavors of Windows, it is an even more imperative piece of software to own.

Granted, a good 90% of home PC users are on an Intel machine, not a Mac... but a good 90% of professionally designed web sites are still designed on a Mac and files to and from Advertising Agencies and creatives are constantly flying through cyberspace. Windows users typically .ZIP their files to compress them and those who fancy Linux are now tarring gunzipping their files (filename.tar.gz) for more compact files. Stuffit Deluxe handles these files without blinking.

Aladdin freely gives away it's unzipping and unstuffing utilities, so any file you zip or stuff can easily and freely be uncompressed by an end user... but even as an end-user, you will have the need to compress files.

E-mail is a very slow transfer port and if you've ever had someone send you a 3MB attachment and had to wait 20 minutes for it to download, you know what I mean. Depending on the nature of the file (text document versus movie), zipping and/or stuffing the file greatly reduces the size, hence lowering the download time.

More importantly, even if you only send your files to one friend who is also a Mac user, you have no way of controlling what mail servers your message is going to bounce on before it gets to your friend... and unless you are in the rare minority, it is highly unlikely that your own ISP is Mac based.

We get spoiled using Macs... we don't have to name our files with extensions (such as filename.doc), but the rest of the world is not so forgiving. Certain file naming conventions may alert a mail server that your innocent attachment is really a virus and delete it or otherwise end up encrypting it before it gets to its intended recipient. If you have several attachments or just one, you can stuff them all into one compact attachment with the proper file naming convention built into the process (such as archive.sit).

Stuffit Deluxe comes with many drag-n-drop applications such as "DropStuff" which allows you to drop as many files as you want onto the icon and end up w/ a quickly compressed file ready to send off through cyberspace. DropZip lets you make .zip archives the same way and SecureDelete lets you shred your online documents so that they can not be recovered using 3rd party software... great for protecting your privacy.

The Stuffit Deluxe application itself lets you customize these tasks at every level and also allows you to create self-extracting archives. Let's say you're sending a file to your dear great aunt Tilly who knows how send and receive e-mail and that's about it... do you really want to try to explain to her that she now has to go to a website to download a file that she needs just to open up the file you sent her? The SelfExtracting Archive is just that... you double-click on it and it opens itself. These types of files are typically larger than a stuffed file because they include the "self-unwrapping" application within them, but it's the way to go for sending to clueless relatives or making files available via your website.

The program also lets you password protect your archives so that only the intended recipient will be able to open it.

With each release, Aladdin continues to improve upon this product and add more features, customization and new drag-n-drop droplets. I could not get my work done if I did not have Stuffit Deluxe.

Rating:
Summary: What can't this do?
Review: The new Stuffit Deluxe 6.5(actually 6.5.1) does everything but cook your breakfast! It still has the familiar magic menu and true intergration features, but also has some very useful additions.
With its new drop box features you can now create special boxes to meet your own criteria for archieving, stuffing and sending via email, or uploading to an FTP server, to name a few. Also remember that stuffit expander can open just about any program or attachment, whether it is encoded or compressed(zip) by windows PC users. Its decoding features may be useful at some point due to the increased security measures we all seem to want to employ...