The loss of quality in software.

[hm_murdock]

There was a time that Stuffit was a well-respected and liked application for Mac. It was reliable, fast, and top quality.

Well, those days are LONG GONE. Now, Stuffit's makers are the same type of people that have the "BUY NOW BUY BUY BUY NOW" sites you find that hawk poorly-compiled clones of Spybot for $29.95 plus shipping for a downloadable installer that doesn't work.

Well, for some reason, I didn't install the version of Stuffit Expander that comes with OS X 10.4. I don't know why. Stupidity? Yeah, that sounds right. So, I go and download the "free" Stuffit Expander 10. Okay, it's actually free. Nothing hidden or any trials or crippleware or any of that. But... of course, you do have to give them an email address... not for confirmation, no, they pretty much say right out that you're gonna get spammed.

Downloaded, installed. No problems. Now today every time it starts, it quits unexpectedly.

That is a loss of quality in software and the people who make it.

[worker201]

Hasn't bothered me much.  All my spam gets collected by Yahoo!'s spam filter, and Stuffit works just how I expected it to.  Using version 10.0.1.  Hasn't crashed in the 2 months I've had it.

[piratePenguin]

Would there not be more decent archive managers for Mac OS X? GNOME has File Roller, which looks like it'd do the job, but I've only used it about once.

[worker201]

Actually, I've never used any automatic file compressors in Linux.  I mean, it takes a real dipshit to not know how to 'tar zxf' a file (or 'tar jxf').  I trust tar and g/bz2 zip, so I stick with them.  They do the work.  Same things can be done on a Mac.  It's just that Stuffit does all that stuff for you.

No offense to JJ, I mean, he knows his way around the Mac, but I have to assume that he is doing something wrong or nonstandard.  Stuffit has been/is a great program, and it has never failed me even once.

[hm_murdock]

Nope. I installed it and it sat there. I went into my old OS 9 Applications folder and ran Expander 6 and it's fine. I ran a disk verify, and there's no problems. I'll re-download Stuffit 10 later and see if that fixes the problem.

Like you said, Stuffit 10 works for you without error, just as, I'm sure it does for most folks. I have, however, heard of a number of quality issues with 10.

[WMD]

Odd...I have 10.4, and the version that's there is 7.0.3.  I've never had anything go wrong...except that one time it refused to expand a RAR file.  (unrar for Linux did it.)

[hm_murdock]

Aye. My thing is, I was stupid and didn't install it

[themacuser]

Stuffup Expander seems to screw up all the time on my OS X machines. I hate it. Give me gzipped DMGs any day.

[cymon]

I hate stuffit, I really just prefer Gzip, you don't have to register to use it.

[Orethrius]

7-Zip is free...

[Siplus]

I don't really like stuffit expander that much...

I'm very accustomed to File Roller in Linux and WinRaR in Windows. Stuffit yeilds little funcitonality. If open a zipped file using stuffit, it unzips it right on the spot, for example.

I like being able to preview what the zip contains, and determining where i wish it to be extracted

That being said, stuffit has never crashed on me. It never fails extracting a file.

[M51DPS]

I remember using Stuffit for years on Classic, but these days I rarely really need it. Just about everything I download is encoded as a DMG (just open it in the Finder), zip (again, Finder in 10.3 and up can do it), or gzip/bzip (Terminal). I guess you could use Stuffit to open them, but what is the point?

[cymon]

The finder now has support for gzip, bzip, tar, and any combination of these. The only archive it doesn't expand is the .sit archives.

Also, Safari will auto-unarchive, as well as mount dmg's.

[davidnix71]

There is a hidden file expander called BOH or something like that, that appears occasionally when expanding a file Stuffit doesn't understand. 7-Zip is free and UnRarX, also free, comes in handy, too.

[cymon]

Yeah, but 7-zip doesn't work on the Macintosh.