UnStuffIt Deluxe has a larger file size and fancier features than StuffIt Expander. Aladdin is continuing to enhance it and will still freely distribute it. Some of you may wonder about the fate of UnStuffIt Deluxe. You can’t miss it the only other choice is Quit. If you use System 6, run StuffIt Expander and select Expand… from the File menu. The resulting file or folder is always saved in the same folder as the original archive.
If the archive contains multiple files, the files will be placed in a folder. Under System 7, drop an archive on the icon and StuffIt Expander automatically expands the archive. Using StuffIt Expander is simplicity itself. Anyone who distributes a file compressed with DiskDoubler should make it a self-extracting archive, and the only reason to use an expansion program on a self-extracting archive is if the extracting code is somehow damaged but the archive itself is fine, an uncommon occurrence. It cannot expand DiskDoubler combined files or self-extracting archives of any type, but there’s no reason it should. StuffIt Expander does not know about Binhex files, but it can expand archives from Compact Pro, StuffIt 1.5.1, StuffIt Deluxe 2.0, StuffIt Deluxe 3.0 (not yet released), along with AppleLink packages. It even works when Nisus is the foreground application, and Nisus doesn’t give much CPU time to background applications. It works well in the background as far as I can tell. Not only that, but it supports AppleEvents (I have to play with it and Frontier a bit) and has intelligent background processing. Aladdin says that StuffIt Expander is compatible with the 68040, 32-bit addressing, and virtual memory. It works fine with System 6.0.4 or later, but System 7 users can take advantage of the Finder’s drag & drop feature by simply dropping archives on StuffIt Expander to have them automatically expanded. StuffIt Expander weighs in at a mere 57K and should be available on the major online services now.
I expect that Morpheus Systems is working on adding these features to Downline, but in the meantime, Aladdin has released a free program called StuffIt Expander, which should be especially convenient for System 7 users.
Of course, it would be nice if Downline understood Compact Pro and StuffIt Deluxe as well, since many people use those formats.
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