I was a regged user of 10, and upgraded to 11.
The archive for 11 came with updates to DropStuff, Expander, Archive Assistant, Magic Menu, StuffIt EA Maker and added new apps like StuffIT Archive Manager and StuffIt Setup Assistant. A restart was required post-installation.
Speaking of installation, you're first invited to drag and drop the Stuffit 11 folder to Applications, and then if you're an upgrader, have to decide if you'll drag n drop the updated apps over the old ones, and at which point do you run the new StuffIt Setup Assistant. That's if, you don't read the README file. I suggest you do. It's got a failsafe though. If you try to use the new archive manager before you run the setup assistant, it will launch the setup assistant.
Stuffit arachive manager (SAM) is an app with a file listing on the right, and smart playlists, erm, I mean different "Collections" of archive types on the left. If you want to see all the .tar files on your spotlight indexed volumes, you click on the Tar icon. Want to do the same with all .sitx files, there's a collection icon for that too.
I've never sought to organize my archives, and have left them all in-place with where the expanded folders used to exist. This can make managing the backups of those archives more simple if I wanted to pick and choose from one or another. Since I mirror-backup my entire boot volume, I have no need for this yet. I suppose if I wanted to find an archive of a project to email somebody real quick, this would do it.
To test that, I dragged and dropped an archive in the list on the right to the Apple mail icon. What happened is that SAM's progress indicator popped up to say that it was extracting files from the archive. WHAT?! Once it was done, I scoured my hard drive trying to figure out where it had extracted to, and it didn't, or did it to somewhere spotlight couldn't see.
It did. I performed a "sudo find / -name "filename.txt" for a text file I knew was in the archive, and guess where it found it? In here:
/Users/username/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/
So be mindful that SAM listed archives, when dragged to Apple Mail, decompress to that above folder. Oh, and and a new e-mail message window never opened. It didn't do anything else besides decompress the archive.
Oh hey, I just disovered that the SAM app lets you right click and choose 'verify' for any archive type. This is nice for when you really REALLY want to make sure that archive isn't corrupted before you delete original fat data.
New archives are created within this app, by clicking on the'new' icon in the toolbar. If you want to browse the contents of a .sitx file you found in this spotlight powered browser app, you highlight it and click on 'browse', and its contents are opened in a new window. There's an image preview drawer that will show you image thumbnails when you highlight an archive that has images in it.
The SEA Maker app is supposed to create OS X compatible SEA files. I haven't tried it but the MagicMenu's only choice for making SEA files, is MacOS Classic compatible ones. It's as if the magic menu didn't get updated to be aware of the presence of the OS X SEA maker? Same deal for right-clicking on files to archive.
Drop boxes are gone from the Magic Menu. Maybe this is a reset and that I have to add them back up there. Or maybe they've done away with them in favor of the new Automator empowered Stuffit! Actions include:
-Create SITX Archive
-Create Tar Archive
-Create Zip Archive
-Expand Archive
When an archive type can be encrypted/pw protected, that option shows up. The Tar option lets you choose the compression method (gzip, bzip2, unix compress).
This new version is apparently multi-core aware for the DC G5s and Intels. I tested it by launching apps, browsing, rendering a scene in Terragen, and it multitasks GREAT compared to every other version before it. You can even use its spotlight-browser window solution while it's making an archive, browse multiple archives etc. all simultaneously. Phew! It's about time.
You can't browse an archive that is being decompressed.
What I struggled the most with in Archive manager, is the collections. Either I can't figure out how to use them, or they just don't work well, but here's what I've noticed:
-You can create your own smart collections, but they don't seem to work very well. I tried to duplicate the SITX collection by specifying, "look for archives of type sitx on this computer" and it only returned the test archives I dragged into the trash. Weird. It ignored the whole rest of the hard drive. But it's default bundled one finds them all. What haven't I specified I wonder?
-I can't get the app to stop showing archives that are in the trash. That's really annoying. I wish there was a preference.
-I couldn't get it to look at networked volumes. It was supposed to be able to do that, but I couldn't figure out how. I mounted my wife's MacBookPro and none of the default or custom smart collections I made took any note of it. I even tried making a smart collection that added the mounted volume as the search point, and nothing. I may be confusing the term 'servers' in SAM to mean shared volume, and not an OS X Server or something. I'll have to read up.
-SAM is supposed to be able to also list archives on removeable media, but I couldn't figure out how. Reading will have to help there too. It may be a mistake to expect it to maintain a list of old archives previously created, vs. it being able to read them the moment a media storage device like a DVD is inserted. I admit to maybe being a little to iView Media catalog minded here.
Besides that, I love this update! It's the best version of StuffIt Deluxe yet!
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