Open Archives Without Stuffit

In the late eighties, the original Stuffit was an invaluable utility, bringing compression and archiving capabilities to the Macintosh filesystem. In Mac OS X, however, you could soon right-click on any file or folder to create a cross-platform .zip file with the "Make Archive" feature (now called "Compress" in Leopard). While the need to compress files with Stuffit passed long ago, the need to "unstuff" old archives has never disappeared. The Unarchiver can open .sit files, as well as more than thirty other legacy formats (such as Disk Doubler and BinHex), and does it all for free.

While stand-alone expansion utilities for Stuffit archives aren't new, The Unarchiver actually ties this ability into the operating system interface, allowing you to uncompress supported formats by simply opening them in the Finder. Just double-click on the application when you first install it to determine which file formats you'd like The Unarchiver to handle.

The author of The Unarchiver isn't selling anything, so users never get nagged to "upgrade" to a deluxe version, a common complaint with the Stuffit-branded utilities. Plus, once you get your users into the habit of compressing files through the Finder, you'll be able to share archives with Windows users without shelling out for Stuffit licenses year after year.

There are, unfortunately, tasks The Unarchiver can't handle. Most notably, it lacks support for the proprietary .sitx format, which offers better compression ratios for graphics files than the original. It's also essentially a front-end for the open source libxad project, so new file formats aren't added to The Unarchiver unless they're added to libxad first. Despite these weaknesses, The Unarchiver is an invaluable tool for breaking the expensive Stuffit habit.

The Unarchiver is available for free download from its creator, Dag Ågren.

View Installer Package Contents

Since Mac OS X premiered in 2001, a wide range of applications have shipped with installers in Apple's .pkg format. While the contents of these installers were originally browsable in the Finder or from the command line, determining exactly what will be installed (and where) can still be a difficult and time-consuming process. It's made all the more frustrating by the fact that .pkginstallers lack an uninstall option, making such detective work a requirement to completely uninstall some third-party software. And in Leopard, there's a new "flat package" format, which can't even be read without Apple's Developer Tools.

That's where Suspicious Package comes in, a Quick Look plugin that lets you view exactly what and how will get installed by any package-format installer.

Just select a .pkg file in the Finder, hit the space key, and you're greeted with an interactive Quick Look window. The folder structure of the installer can be browsed using the unfolding arrows to the left of the file names, and the installation scripts can be read with the expansion button to the left of the script icon. Suspicious Package even lets you know if an installer requires an administrative password to run, or that your machine be restarted after installation.

Designed to do just one thing, and do it very well, Suspicious Package is an incredibly clever (and incredibly useful) little utility. It's also an enormous time saver, and a fantastic extension of Apple's Quick Look framework.

Suspicious Package is available for free from Mothers Ruin Software.

Configure Launchd Graphically

We've written about launchd (the daemon which governs OS X system processes) before. We've detailed its xml-based syntax, even as we've struggled to remember every tag and attribute. We could have saved ourselves the trouble and pointed to Peter Borg's Lingon, the free graphical editor for launchd plist files.

Inexplicably named for a swedish berry, with an icon like the giant red ball from Alias, Lingon's odd presentation quickly gives way to its powerful and convenient functionality. Its main panel allows you to create and edit launchd jobs with just their names, the Terminal command or script they run, and their scheduling options.

An advanced mode offers syntax-colored construction of the full range of launchd options (such as inetd compatibility, hard resource limits, and listening sockets). For power-users, Lingon is a tremendous time-saver, eliminating a great deal of referencing and proofreading for what amounts to an occasional task. For the novice, it's like Dreamweaver for dangerous system modifications.

Lingon has one major annoyance: The inability to save files anywhere other than live system directories. This isn't so bad if you're composing your plist files on a system that's meant to run them. If you're composing a launchd job for another machine (or many others), you must save it first without enabling it, then fish it out of the directory Lingon squirreled it away in. A "Save As" feature would go a long way here, and the absense of one could cause serious trouble for a careless user.

Despite its eccentricities, Lingon is an impressive tool, simple when it needs to be and complex where it has to. It's also a generous open-sourced contribution to the Macintosh administration community.

Lingon is available free of charge.

Mount SFTP Volumes Locally

For years, systems administrators have used SFTP (the SSH File Transfer Protocol) to provide secure access to remote file systems. Based not on FTP, but on the Unix Secure Shell, SFTP allows the encrypted transfer of files over any network. While SFTP's command options and version compatibility can make it a complicated tool, Magnetk's ExpanDrive makes it easy to appreciate, offering Macintosh users a near-flawless way to mount and access remote servers as local disks.

The heart of ExpanDrive is the Drive Manager window, opened from its magnet-shaped icon in the OS X menu bar. From this window, you can add, subtract, and manage any remote volume on a server offering SSH. Fill in the server address, your login name and password, and (optionally) the remote server path you're logging in to and name you'd like for the local version of the volume.

The beauty of ExpanDrive is that once it's up and running, you can forget it's there entirely. It handles network difficulties gracefully, faster and more stably than the Macintosh Finder itself, and reconnects seamlessly when disconnected.

ExpanDrive keeps improving as well, with four significant updates this month alone. The coming version, promised by Magnetk in the next few weeks, includes Applescript integration and command line utilities for mounting SFTP shares from the Terminal.

ExpanDrive isn't without its issues. It handles Unix symlinks (file pointers like Windows shortcuts) poorly, can't transfer the resource fork on legacy Macintosh files (and fonts), and lacks a standardized interface or dock icon. If these issues apply in your environment, they may very well be deal breakers. For web development, image libraries, or management tasks, on the other hand, ExpanDrive outshines any other available tools for secure file system access.

ExpanDrive retails for $29.

Synchronize iCal Calendars

It lacks a central server or domain-based authentication. It has no availability browsing. Until recently, it only worked on local networks. Why even review a calendaring product with the limitations of BusySync?

Because despite it's lack of enterprise-level features, BusySync works the way many administrators wish iCal Server had. It's simple for end users, elegant in execution, and provides read/write access to iCal calendars with little configuration. While it's not a feasible solution in larger environments, for a small company or independent department BusySync could very well be the perfect calendaring solution.

When installed on each client machine, the BusySync configuration options appear in System Preferences. The "Publish" pane allows users to select which calendars are shared, whether they can be written to, and if they're password protected. For Leopard users, it also allows the use of SSL to secure calendar connections. The "Subscribe" pane lets users see the available calendars on their network, choose which they'd like access to, and when they last synced with them. There's even a single password field, with read or write access determined by which password is used. By sharing out user calendars from a central "server" machine, you can implement an additional layer of management control and redundancy as well.

Despite it's modest feature set, BusySync functions beautifully, allowing users to share and edit iCal data quickly and seamlessly. For a team too small to invest in iCal Server, it's an easy, intuitive, and low-maintenance method for collaborative calendaring.

Update: Since our initial review, Leopard 10.5.2 has broken BusySync severely, leaving users unsure when and if their calendars were syncing properly. While sympathetic, BusyMac were unable to implement an effective workaround to the issue. Fortunately, the more recent 10.5.4 update seems to have squashed the SyncServices bugs that had rendered BusySync unusable.

BusySync retails for $19.95 per-user.