Product Reviews

Aladdin Systems has been offering compression and encoding software for many years, and the .sit file format has become the dominant compressed file format for the Macintosh world. StuffIt Deluxe is the commercial enhanced version, which partners the shareware and freeware utilities, DropStuff and StuffIt Expander, which ship with the Mac OS.

StuffIt Deluxe is a collection of utilities for managing the process of creating compressed archives and all the ancillary tasks of converting and encoding files. The StuffIt Deluxe application allows you to add and remove files from archives and convert files from foreign compressed file formats.

There are various drag-and-drop tools included, which allow you to delete files; convert archives to the new StuffIt 5 format; segment files; compress to Zip files; compress to StuffIt files; and lastly to decompress files. The last two of these are the familiar DropStuff and StuffIt Expander.

Installation is simple with options to install the main application with or without the true finder integration. The only criticism is that the progress bar bears no relation to what is actually going on.

Many more new features for Windows compatibility are provided, including Zip compression and the ability to create .exe self-extracting Windows applications.

Magic Menu puts a special StuffIt menu in the menu bar for quick access to StuffIt Deluxe's features, and there's also a Contextual Menu module for control-clicking files.

True Finder Integration is a control panel from which you can individually enable each of three modules which incteract directly with the archives. Archive Via Rename enables

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decompression and encoding by renaming the file - this includes support for Zip and uu-encoding. It's a clever and useful feature: simply delete the .sit extension and a few seconds later a decompressed version of the file will appear.

Magic Menu adds a menu to the Finder and provides access to many StuffIt Deluxe features. New additions to this menu are for collecting files for archiving. These include the Gather command, which moves files into a folder on the desktop, the Copy/Move command, as well as facilities to create mail attachments directly from the desktop. Then there's StuffIt Browser, which makes archives operate like folders, so that you can view their contents and drag and drop files into them. This feature is only slightly slower than opening a Finder window. It also has a few screen drawing glitches - sometimes lines are left behind after highlighting an item - but nothing serious.

StuffIt Deluxe is fully scriptable, as are many of the drag-and-drop applications. The documentation is sparse on this aspect of the product, but there's enough to give an idea of what is possible. Example snippets are given for HyperCard, AppleScript and Frontier.

StuffIt Deluxe 5.5 supports many common file formats and provides decompression for several Windows compression formats. There's MIME and uu-encoding/decoding for dealing with email attachments, Unix tar files and compression for creation and extraction, plus Mac OS encoding file formats binhex and Mac binary. Finally, there's a new edition of DiskDoubler archive extraction.

There's a speed improvement, too. Aladdin claims StuffIt Deluxe 5.5 is 20% faster than the previous version and that the version 5 format .sit files are 20% smaller than Zip files.

There's also a free version 5.15 updater for version 5.0/5.1 owners who just want Mac OS 9 support as well as 5.5 versions of the freeware, StuffIt Expander, and the shareware, DropStuff, to support Mac OS 9.

StuffIt Deluxe 5.5 is a good upgrade if you work in a mixed environment or need to compress files on a regular basis. The drag-and-drop tools are useful and the Archive Via Rename feature is great, but whether the program is worth the additional expense depends on how often you need to compress files.