The Unarchiver
The Unarchiver is a replacement for Apple’s relatively hidden “BOMArchiveHelper” application, which is responsible for the Zip, Tar, and gzip abilities built into the Finder. Not only does The Unarchiver come pre-loaded with much better icons, but it handles Zip, Tar, gzip, bzip2, RAR (including multi-part RAR), 7-zip, StuffIt (but not SitX, sadly), and many other formats. Installation is as easy as dropping the program somewhere on disk, perhaps in /Applications, and then associating preferred formats to be opened with The Unarchiver. I find it’s a much better archive handler than Apple’s own, and the “brown box” icons help differentiate compressed files from regular documents.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
I started using Unarchiver this weekend and I like it very much.. beats UnRarX for sure. Now if only I could find such a nice application that can create tarballs, RARs, etc.
September 26th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Nice app. Seems faster than the alternatives and the ability to unzip self-extracting EXE files is always nice to have.
October 9th, 2006 at 5:26 am
The Unarchiver is indeed fast and useful. But it freezes from time to time. Worse: the window that says “extracting etc” will not close when clicking on the cross sign. This is not important, as one can just minimize it - send it to the Dock - and use something else (Stuffit etc).
Trashing the preference file and restarting the Mac fixes the problem.
Again, not a big one, but a weakness nonetheless.
December 21st, 2006 at 3:18 am
does the unarchiver have the ability to preview the archives content?