StuffIt Deluxe's New One-Step Toolbar

By  |  Friday, September 17, 2010 at 9:06 am

For years, I was serious about my compression software. (Anyone else remember a wonderful utility from the 1990s called ZipMagic?) In recent years, however, I’ve pretty much slipped into using the rudimentary compression and decompression features built into both Windows and OS X.

But I like Smith Micro’s StuffIt Deluxe 2011, the latest version of one of the most venerable Mac compression utilities. The new version includes a toolbar called StuffIt Destinations that automates the normally two-step process of compressing a file and then doing something useful with it–such as e-mailing it, uploading it to an FTP server, burning it to DVD, or using Smith Micro’s SendStuffNow (a YouSendIt competitor) to let other folks download large files which would choke their e-mail.

Dragging a file from the OS X finder onto a Destinations tile starts the specified process; you can choose to get an on-screen or e-mailed alert when it’s finished. The program supports both its own StuffIt X compression format and the much more universal Zip, and includes various other compression- and decompression-related features such as the ability to create DMG virtual disks and to decompress files in a bevy of formats. (I just used it with a file compressed with RAR, a format which OS X can’t handle by itself.)

You can also create your own Destinations tiles with different combinations of compression format, destination, and settings, or tweak the built-in ones.

StuffIt Deluxe 2011 is $49.99, which gets you a nicely flexible three-computer license (you listening, Microsoft?) which covers both Macs and Windows PCs. (The Windows version of the program, however, is the 2010 edition, without Destinations–Smith Micro hasn’t updated it yet.) The price also includes three months of SendStuffNow Pro, which permits transfer of files up to 2GB.

 
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4 Comments For This Post

  1. arw Says:

    I quit using Stuffit years ago. It's just too slow for compression and expansion. Zip is much faster. And most Mac users from the PC side prefer RAR which works at about the same rate as zip.

  2. Harry McCracken Says:

    I haven't benchmarked this version, but it seems adequately speedy. (The StuffIt X format is more efficient than Zip, but me, I'd use Zip over any other format simply because it's so much more universal…)

    –Harry

  3. Alberto Says:

    Better still are compressed disk images. So you can archive things compressed, but still use them without decompriming first.

  4. M. Dayrit Says:

    As far as compression goes, StuffIt is by far the best product I've used. Zip is a little bit faster, but StuffIt can compress files that are already compressed like jpg, mp3, and tiff. Plus you get a lot more than you would with WinZip, for about the same price.