Robert's blog

Breaking the three week silence (it was just too hot to type and  taking a cold shower after every other keystroke proved to be pretty inefficent), I can announce the latest update for BetterZip. This update mainly fixes a few problems with version 1.2. I really encourage you to download and install this update.

New Features

• GZip and BZip2 compressed tar archives now support setting the compression level.

Changes

• Passwords can now contain spaces and various other special characters.
• When extracting a file package and there already is a package with the same name at the extraction destination the contents are not merged. Instead the existing package is completely replaced. Of course a warning panel will ask you whether you really want to do this.
• Saving archives and overwriting an old version got some additional level of security. Basically, a backup of the old archive is created and only removed after the new archive has sucessfully been written.
• When trying to create an archive in a folder where you have no permission to write an error message will tell you what the problem is. This is not perfect, and I am working on a feature to let you authenticate as admin instead.

Bugs fixed

• On some systems opening single GZip and BZip2 files was broken.
• Creating archives on other devices than the system disk (e.g., network mounted folders) was broken under certain conditions.

I have just finished uploading the new version 1.2. According to its release notes it has a few neat new features and enhancements:

New Features

• BetterZip can extract and create archives in these new formats now: RAR, 7-Zip. Choose which format to use in the «Save File» panel. These two new formats allow strong password encryption and multi-volume archives. Creating RAR files requires downloading (and registering) RAR as an external program. Open the preferences panel and click Helpers for more information.
• BetterZip can now save PKZip2 encrypted ZIP archives.
• BetterZip can open CPIO and compressed CPGZ files.
• BetterZip opens archives 5 (yes: five!) times faster than before. Which is especially cool when opening an archive containing some 30000 files. Was: 26 seconds, is: 5 seconds on my PowerMac Dual G5. Extraction and saving also are a little faster now.
• A new function «1-Click Extraction» lets you extract the whole archive into the folder where the archive is located. You can make this default through the preferences panel.
• BetterZip now has a trancript drawer that lets you inspect the output of the external programs.
• Added a Beta programme update function.

Changes

• When extracting a small archive (less than three MB) no progress panel will drop down. Instead the cycling progress indicator in the lower left corner of the window will spin. Showing and removing the progress panel took more time than the actual archive operation. No way am I going to waste your time with window animations.
• The keyboard shortcuts for the various extraction operations have changed. The base command sequence remains ⌘ R. ⇧ will toggle Extract All/Selected while ⌥ now toggles 1-Click Extraction.
• Temporary folders are no longer hidden. So in the case of a crash minor instability phenomenon you will see it in Finder and can remove it more easily.

I hope you like it. Let me hear what you think!

Now that I have finished and tested all compression formats that you will see in version 1.2, I have, of course, prepared a little table for you comparing the speed and compression ratios.

I assembled a 42 MB folder with:

• 24.2 MB - an old Web project (PHP, HTML, Photoshop files, JPEGs, Flash)
• 10.4 MB - Subversion repository
• 3.9 MB - BetterZip.app (yes, it's a bit larger now)
• 3.5 MB - Various Word and PDF documents
• 0.6 MB - Excel spreadsheets (my income tax files, ugh!)

	Saving (s)	Extracting (s)	Size (bytes)	Ratio
Original	-	-	40,772,817	100%
ZIP	10	9	23,555,749	57.8%
TAR	10	7	42,076,160	103.2%
TGZ	13	7	23,040,000	56.5%
TBZ	40	14	21,667,840	53.1%
RAR	70	11	18,350,510	45.0%
RAR-High	74	13	18,290,152	44.9%
7-Zip-Low	40	27	19,711,979	48.3%
7-Zip	54	29	17,513,607	43.0%
7-Zip-High	55	29	17,281,293	42.4%
SitX *	30	28	20,975,408	51.4%

ZIP and TGZ are very fast and are wide-spread, so everyone will be able to extract these formats on any platform without downloading extra software.

RAR has better (although the slowest) compression but is incredibly fast when decompressing.

However, I declare 7-Zip the winner. There was not a single test case during the development and testing phase where another format produced smaller archives. It has strong password encryption, can produce multi-volume archives, and the algorithms are open source and have been ported to many platforms.

Just in case you didn't know: TAR doesn't compress its contents. It just puts all the files into one big file for later compression with another program, e.g. GZip or BZip2 which in turn can only compress one single file. They're a perfect match.

Have a nice weekend and be sure to check out the new version on Tuesday!

*) BetterZip cannot create or extract SitX archives, but as requested I added the numbers anyway.

I feel a little sadistic tonight. So I give you a little screenshot of version 1.2 showing off some of the things BetterZip can already do. Can you spot all the changes?

I will release the new version on July 11th. So only 10 more days of waiting, painful waiting. Sure, I am exaggerating, it's only an archiver. No, you can't get it earlier, there's a lot of polishing to do. Error handling. Testing. Documenting. Packaging.

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Okay, now to the really important news: Muse have released their new album "Black Holes & Revelations". This is some incredible piece of music. Muse are probably the best band in the world today. Think of J.S. Bach meeting Queen (the band not her Majesty), add some super heavy guitar riffs, a lot of today's electronics, beautiful piano parts, a great voice (not, that Bach didn't have a great voice), and fix everything together with Nine Inch Nails. (Couldn't resist.) This album has absolutely no filler tracks and everyone buying only the one hit they play on the radio is missing 10 great songs.

Unfortunately, my dear American readers, you will have to wait for this album until... July 11th. Don't you just love coincidences?

Version 1.1.1 fixes two smaller bugs:

• The check boxes for "Display hidden files/folders" and "File packages are expandable" in the preferences panel were not initialized correctly.
• JAR/WAR/EAR files are recognized as archives again. This was broken in version 1.1.

By the way, I am making good progress with RAR and 7-zip support. RAR is already done. 7-zip will take some more time, but I think the next version will be ready in about 2 weeks.