Robert's blog

Here comes the sun, do do do do
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right

Little darling
It's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling
It feels like years since it's been here

Here comes the sun, do do do do
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right

Little darling
The smiles returning to the faces
Little darling
I seems like years since it's been here

Here comes the sun, do do do do
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes

Little darling
I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling
It seems like years since it's been clear

Here comes the sun, do do do do
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right
Here comes the sun, do do do do
Here comes the sun
It's all right
It's all right

My friend Walter had a great idea: Cleaning should not only remove resource forks, .DS_Store, and icon^M files, but arbitrary files and folders matching user configurable regular expression patterns. This way developers around the world could finally remove .svn or CVS folders from their archives with one click.

But wouldn't it be better to separate the removal of Mac stuff from the removal of said source control stuff? I think so. As a Mac developer I sure want to keep resource forks on my files while removing .svn folders from my regularly created source snapshots.

Just recently another user asked me what the difference between cleaning an archive and changing the archive mode (Mac mode/clean mode) to clean mode was. Frankly, the difference is a stupid one:

• Changing the mode determines what happens when saving the archive. In clean mode all Mac specific stuff is removed, while in Mac mode resource forks are preserved.
• Cleaning removes the Mac stuff currently in the archive. If you later add files with resource forks these new files will preserve their resource forks. Stupid, I told you.

So here's how it is going to work in the future: Cleaning will remove files and folders matching the regular expressions you can configure in the preferences window.
The mode switch will control whether Mac specific files are saved together with the data or not. You can choose a default mode in the preferences window.

What do you think? A Beta version will be available later this week. If you wish to participate, enable the beta update check in the preferences window or check this web site.

So, after a long time of silence, there is a new blog entry. Well, it's more an announcement of the new version 1.3.

I am rather proud of this version, because it brings a lot of new stuff, most prominently the WinZip compatible AES-256 encryption. Yes, that's right, BetterZip can now create zip files with strong encryption that can be opened in WinZip. Other compression tools on the Mac, StuffIt Deluxe for instance, can't do that.

Another neat, new feature is the filesystem browser. It's an additional drawer which displays the folders on your hard discs. In the folders you see all the archives you have. And nothing else. It's basically an archive-centric, filtered view upon your Mac. Just double-click an archive in the browser and it's opened in the current window. Give it a try: Press Command+B or select Show/Hide Filesystem browser from the view menu.

As the list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes is rather long this time, I'll just refer you to the version history.

Like always, I am looking forward to reading your feedback. By the way: You can stop sending requests for AppleScriptability and a Finder context menu plugin now - I'll start with that shortly.

Apple Mail usually does a decent job in filtering out junk mail, but for some time now I get a lot of spam that isn't recognized and filtered out by Mail.

1. Image Spam: The text of the message is really an image. Tim Gaden has an article on his blog HawkWings showing how to get Mail to filter those out.

2. Another spam type that is not filtered out looks something like this:

After reading Tim's blog post I used the opportunity (motivation) and created a rule for this one too. Here's what it looks like:

The first string to look for in the mail is: ------ Original message text ------

The second string is: ------ End of original message text ------

The third is 5 returns. Just copy it from the spam mail and paste it into the text field.

The last string to compare is what every good spam mail needs: http://

I have just uploaded the new version 1.2.2. It has a number of user requested features and bug fixes for problems you reported during the last weeks. BetterZip is getting more mature with every release as I am putting a lot of time and energy into making it better. You know, this is no spare time project, but my full-time job. And a rewarding job it is. The amount of positive feedback I get from Mac users all around the world alone makes it a valuable experience. So, thanks for your support and keep posting those great ideas for future enhancements!

New Features

• Japanese and French localizations have been added.
• Added a flat list view which will show you all the files and folders in a flat view without the folder hierarchy. This mode is useful, if you need to sort the files regardless of their position within the folder hierarchy (e.g., by modification date).
• Added a path column, especially needed when using the flat list view.
• BetterZip can now open and extract old-style multi-volume rar archives (with extensions rar, r00, r01, ...) as well as the already supported new-style archives (with extensions part01.rar, part02.rar, ...)

Changes

• The .app extension is now displayed.
• Text columns are now trimmed in the middle (like Finder does).

Bugs fixed

• The preferences panel didn't work on the first click (funny that very few people noticed this).
• Compression factor on uncompressed tar could be changed, without effect, of course.
• If there was a space in the path to BetterZip's current location, 7-zip and rar didn't work.
• BetterZip crashed when saving as tar or 7-zip in Mac-mode and the user was not the owner of all files in the archive.
• BetterZip crashed when trying (and failing) to extract from a multi-volume zip file, which is still not supported, but at least it doesn't crash anymore.
• A file with unprintable characters in its filename was not extracted from zip archives.