[macintologist]

Seriously, it gets horrible ratings at all the Mac download sites. All Macs used to bundle it, now they don't. All downloads were .sit, now they are .dmg. What went wrong with Stuffit Expander and the Stuffit format?

[Mithras]

Slow, crappy interface, poor support for OS X features (like permissions), umm, costs money when Apple had perfectly good free alternatives to offer to developers, umm, anything else?

[spacefreak]

It became nagware. One could use it free to unstuff a package, but if one wanted to compress a folder, you had to buy a different version.

Eventually, there was going to be a popular workaround to the "if you want to compress, pay up" attitude of Stuffit.

[rickey939]

The Unarchiver 1.1 - MacUpdate

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by rickey939

The Unarchiver 1.1 - MacUpdate

Looks nice. But without .sitx support its usefulness is pretty limited.

[Millennium]

What went wrong with Expander is that it went nagware.

As for the format, Apple fought back with its own format, which is just plain better in a lot of ways. Stuffit did quite well with preserving HFS metadata in its day, but .dmg one-ups it by basically replicating the filesystem, essentially eliminating the need to preserve it at all (.dmg is basically the .iso disk image format, except that it's formatted as HFS+ instead of ISO-9600). These loopback filesystem image formats are becoming fashionable for archiving, since the only thing required to read them is a driver for the filesystem, which for common filesystems is already built into most platforms.

By divorcing the archive format from the compression algorithm, it also allows better algorithms to be used: this is where the .dmg.gz that you see out there comes from. Theoretically one could also use .dmg.bz2 for even better compression -as with gunzip, [b]bunzip2[/i] is built into OSX- but this doesn't seem to have caught on for some reason.

[rickey939]

Originally Posted by Lateralus

Looks nice. But without .sitx support its usefulness is pretty limited.

People should stop using that proprietary crap format.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by macintologist

Seriously, it gets horrible ratings at all the Mac download sites. All Macs used to bundle it, now they don't. All downloads were .sit, now they are .dmg. What went wrong with Stuffit Expander and the Stuffit format?

Proprietary formats are a negative anyway. There are a lot of compression formats out there, many of which are as good or better than SIT and don't tie you to one vendor forever.

[chabig]

Originally Posted by Lateralus

Looks nice. But without .sitx support its usefulness is pretty limited.

I haven't seen a .sitx file in years.

[rickey939]

Originally Posted by chabig

I haven't seen a .sitx file in years.

We've started to decline that method of compression at our office...it's either .zip, .sit or it won't be allowed/accepted.

[ehjay]

At least they've released a new Universal version of Expander.

[OwlBoy]

Originally Posted by chabig

I haven't seen a .sitx file in years.

Ditto. It is not used for software distribution any more. Though it might still be stuck in some companies work flows.

-Owl

[bstone]

Wrong forum.

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by bstone

Wrong forum.

If Millennium or I thought so we'd have moved it by now.

In general, software topics should go in the Applications forum. But that's because they're usually support related. This is more of a general discussion so I see no reason to move it.

[Nai no Kami]

Originally Posted by bstone

Wrong forum.

Please reserve that comment when you are granted a moderator or admin account. Nothing else constructive to say?. What's wrong with you forum-police people?.

Sorry, I don't post comments like this, but either I had a bad day and couldn't resist or my tolerance quota was exceeded.

[brassplayersrock²]

cats ceo?

[Gossamer]

Originally Posted by brassplayersrock

cats ceo?

That was my first thought.

[D. S. Troyer]

Originally Posted by macintologist

Seriously, it gets horrible ratings at all the Mac download sites. All Macs used to bundle it, now they don't. All downloads were .sit, now they are .dmg. What went wrong with Stuffit Expander and the Stuffit format?

Wrong forum!

Sean O'sama

[goMac]

There was no free archiver for Stuffit.

[PB2K]

sometimes my selfmade .SIT's were incompatible with other people's Stiffit expander. That's a really lousy experience and makes you avoid the program forever.

[Dark Helmet]

It is simple really. Back until 10.3 (or 10.4) offered built in zip compression there was no alternatives to compress files on a Mac. Stuffit sucked but what else can you do?

At one point in the late 90's a competitor came out for a very short while and then disappeared.

Competition is good.

[Silky Voice of The Gorn]

DiskDoubler. Loved it. There's a DD expander out there somewhere for the odd old archived file I need to expand.

[macintologist]

didn't .img or .smi files exist on the mac os 9?

[Jim Paradise]

Originally Posted by macintologist

didn't .img or .smi files exist on the mac os 9?

They certainly did.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by macintologist

didn't .img or .smi files exist on the mac os 9?

Back in the dial up days if stuffit could make it 100k smaller people went with it instead.

[Salty]

I think it was the switch to nagware that really got people annoyed. That and the fact that to download the free version was a pain in the ass. The problem is when people offer free apps but then make it really difficult to find them. The fact is Aladin/Allume should have been content to simply charge people who were making the .sit files instead of those who simply wanted to unstuff them.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by Millennium

What went wrong with Expander is that it went nagware.

Well, what actually went wrong is that Raymond Lau stopped being involved with development in 1995 (he wrote it in 1987 at age fifteen and paid for MIT with it many times over).

Raymond Lau: StuffIt

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by macintologist

didn't .img or .smi files exist on the mac os 9?

They did, but they weren't as easy to use. The software to mount them as volumes wasn't built into the OS (thus the need for .smi files, Self-Mounting Images), and at the time HFS/HFS+ didn't support features like background images, which vendors have started to use for installation instructions. The result was that no one really used them except Apple, and then only for software updates.

Actually, to be fair, Apple didn't really invent the idea of loopback images, nor were they the first to build them into an operating system (it's been possible in Unices for years). But before this, they weren't really used much except for copying disks or developing new filesystems. Apple really hit the nail when they got the idea to use them as a format for distributing software. It's one of the things that many people on other operating systems, have taken notice of.

[Dark Helmet]

So is ZIP pretty much the end of the line for compression or is there still possibilities to have another format that compresses much more heavily?

Even then is file compression still as important as it used to be now that we have high speed networks?

[Chuckit]

There already are formats that compress more heavily than ZIP. OS X includes bzip2, which is much better than ZIP. It's just less well-supported by all the computers out there, so Apple went with ZIP for its Finder compression, since pretty much anybody can use those.

[turtle777]

Doesn't RAR compress more than ZIP as well ?

-t

[Dakar]

Originally Posted by what_the_heck

Doesn't RAR compress more than ZIP as well ?

-t

That's what all the porn I download indicates.

Games. I said games.

[Gossamer]

Originally Posted by Dakar

That's what all the porn I download indicates.

Games. I said games.

[brassplayersrock²]

Originally Posted by Dakar

That's what all the porn I download indicates.

Games. I said games.

gets the award for make me LOL in class

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

There already are formats that compress more heavily than ZIP. OS X includes bzip2, which is much better than ZIP. It's just less well-supported by all the computers out there, so Apple went with ZIP for its Finder compression, since pretty much anybody can use those.

Here's where things get confusing, however. ZIP is a container format, not a compression algorithm. Historically, in fact, there have been several compression algorithms used by ZIP programs. The one that's currently most popular, sometimes called deflate, is actually the same one used by gzip. Before that, one called "implode" was popular, and although I'm not certain of this I believe it's the same one used by GIF files.

I'm not actually sure what algorithm RAR uses, but once again, RAR is actually a container format. RAR has a reputation for having better compression than ZIP (though again, this is a product of the algorithm, not the format), but as a format it's also more robust than ZIP due to better error-checking facilities.

[Eug]

StuffIt 11 is out.

Compress JPEG Photos and Images by up to 30%! With its revolutionary new Image compression technology, StuffIt archives what no other compression product has been able to do – reduce the size of JPEG photos and images up to 30% with absolutely no loss in image quality!

[Kevin]

I haven't used stuffit in a long time. I dmg or .zip using the system.

Faster and no crap.

I edited out the "Stuffit" banner from expander long ago in the progress window.

[Art Vandelay]

Originally Posted by Eug

StuffIt 11 is out.

Compress JPEG Photos and Images by up to 30%! With its revolutionary new Image compression technology, StuffIt archives what no other compression product has been able to do – reduce the size of JPEG photos and images up to 30% with absolutely no loss in image quality!

I'm pretty sure that was new in Stuffit 10 and they are just regurgitating the feature in Stuffit 11's notes.