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.