[alex_kac]

This is, as far as we can find, the only full GUIfied interface on tar and tgz files. It is in Public Beta.

We wrote this app primarily because in a sysadmin environment we deal constantly with hundreds of tar files and we wanted an easy to use app to deal with them. We also thought it might be of use to the OS X community especially as more Linux and other UNIX users come into the fold. But even with that, tar is a great compression for average Mac users who just want a cross platform compression utility.

http://beta.webis.net/TarMacPublicBeta.tgz
http://www.pocketinformant.com/Forum...showtopic=5327

We'll have more information as we progress very slowly to final release.

[Zimphire]

Thanks. I will check it out.

[edit]
Safari can�t open the page �http://beta.webis.net/TarMacPublicBeta.tgz� because it can�t find the server �beta.webis.net�.

[zachs]

Originally posted by Zimphire:
Thanks. I will check it out.

[edit]
Safari can�t open the page �http://beta.webis.net/TarMacPublicBeta.tgz� because it can�t find the server �beta.webis.net�.

Me too.

[alex_kac]

Grrr. I pasted it in wrong and BIND crapped out on me on the beta server. Had to reboot it.

http://beta.webis.net/TarMac/TarMacPublicBeta.tgz

Try it again. Thanks and I apologize for that.

[zachs]

Originally posted by alex_kac:
Grrr. I pasted it in wrong and BIND crapped out on me on the beta server. Had to reboot it.

http://beta.webis.net/TarMac/TarMacPublicBeta.tgz

Try it again. Thanks and I apologize for that.

Cool. I'll post back if I encounter any bugs.

[alex_kac]

Thanks

[nooon]

ok, so how is tar-compression compared to stuffit and zip? I always seem to get the best compression with stuffit, but I simply refuse to use it.

[sushiism]

if I remember rightly tar as such isn't compression at all, just makes several files in to a singular uncompressed archive, thus a tar is usually compressed a different way with gzip or whatever

[neoTony]

yes, tar is an archival format, not a compression format. As sushiism stated, it is simply used to roll many files into one big file (it was originally used for deploying to tape - hence it's name - Tape ARchiver).

If you want compression, you'll still need to gzip or bzip the resultant tape archive.

[yukon]

In general and IMHO, here's how it breaks down for file compression ability.

z<zip<gzip<ace<rar<bzip2<rar3<uha<7zip. ace can move one up in there, UHA can move down one...not sure where .sit fits in because it changes and I stopped using it in v.5 or something. 7zip is new and incompatible (no PPC version either). all that's just for compressing power, there's differences in time usage, free-ness...gzip, bzip, and 7zip are all open source nonproprietary, ace/rar/uha/sit are proprietary, z is old and i've never used it, zip was proprietary but i'm not sure what happened to make it free or it's status (gzip, combined with tar, is slightly better, and also free). sit respects resource forks (a new OS X user probably doesn't have many of those), as would dmg, HFSTar (a special version of TAR), and apple's zip.....you can always binary encode or binhex these files before using compression.

I usually argued to use bzip2, when rar3 won it was confusing until I found 7zip was hosted on sourceforge. Nice to see another tar frontend for OS X, the ones out there are crap (and there are programs, guitar, tarpit, freetar...uh, droptar2bz or something....) and they've screwed up archives for me before. A utility to find files with resource forks would be cool. I believe tarpit has a feature to binary encode all files before compression.

[alex_kac]

Yes, and TarMac will macbinary resource forks in its final incarnation. We plan to have another build out before it expires November 1st.

I'm glad you guys like it. We also want to add in future releases Finder integration and other Stuffit like features. But as usual all that depends on how many people actually buy the first release

[yukon]

Hmm, bundling hfstar or something would be cool, macbinary only if it's autosensing of resource forks. "Integration" is generally unnecessary, one of the features that makes me look down on a program (like WinACE, Stuffit, even 7Zip did it).

Oh, buy it? Not for me, thanks, it's just a convieniance issue for me, make it easy and others would buy though.

Freeware/OSS, in relitive order of how well I know the program and how much I trust it-
TarPit (compress gz/bz2/Z)-
http://homepage.mac.com/entropy4/software/
DropTBZ2 (compress most, encrypt, shred, hash, click the powerbook)
http://homepage.mac.com/hteric/Menu3.html
GUI Tar (compress)-
http://www.edenwaith.com/products/guitar/
untested by myself--
Untar (uncompresses)-
http://www.edenwaith.com/products/guitar/untar.php
CleanArchiver (compress, decompress)-
http://homepage3.nifty.com/analog_only/en/software/
KTar-
http://www.khertan.net/

ColdCompress's site is down ATM, as regrettably is FreeTar's-
http://mjsoftware.grinninggator.net/freetar.html

[alex_kac]

Yeah, we've looked at those but they just don't make it easy. None of them do.

So you wouldn't buy it for $10?

[yukon]

I found TarPit simple yet it had the features, I forget GUI Tar specifically, FreeTar was difficult yet maybe the most useful, DropTBZ2 was very simple. All drag and drop with additional available settings and usable defaults. The only difficulty would be the terms, the names of the actual archive formats themselves (.tbz was unknown to mac users years ago).

10$, myself, no. There's freeware out there, I'm comfortable doing this in the CLI, but I believe the GUI is nicer with drag&drop. Wouldn't be too hard to call tar from applescript, there's ones that do that on versiontracker, and some of the programs are OSS so they are fixable. To be honest, the thing that turned me off of these programs was the bugs - a small system partition makes many of them fail (temp files on the root or something...), one program I didn't mention wrote a garbage file....FreeTar and DropTBZ2 both could quietly fail, DTBZ2 when making gzip archives in the outdated .8 version I believe.

If a utilitiy was more trustable with data, then I'd use it, but paying for a compression/decompression program when I already use the CLI, not for me :-\. I'm sure many others would buy it, and I encourage you to continue development - a useful yet easy application is nice to see, and promoting open standards is always a good thing . Good luck

[alex_kac]

TarMac 1.0 was just released.

http://www.webis.net/p_tarmac.php