StuffIt Standard Mac.

StuffIt Standard is an archive-building program that supports various archive types.

Besides the TAR and the ZIP support, the program has the support for its own proprietary formats, SIT/SITX. Since I have read many discussions on forums about this program, I was curios about how this new version actually acts.

The interface looks exactly like the previous version. I really believe the people who said that this program has old code within it, were right. It really looks like the previous version with bug fixes.

Since there are free tools that have the support for TAR and ZIP, I've tried the SITX archiving engine. I didn't waste time with small tests. I provided the program my 'test_files' folder, something that I personally call a 'Stress Test' for the archiving programs. It has within 2.33 GB of all kind of files, including archives, documents, text files, image files and media files (videos and audio files).

It was a stress test indeed. The first time I tried it the application crashed completely. I have tried the same action several times after this, but it didn't crash again. I couldn't localize the reason for this behavior.

The second time I tried this stress test, it managed to output the archive file without any trouble. The compression part was quite good. I tried the 'Better Compression' profile. The archive was smaller than the output archive from 7zX, a free archiving program that I tested couple of days ago.

What I like about this software is the fact that it uses all the resources while archiving. This is one of the applications that has the full support for dual-core machines. The CPU usage was 100% on both of the cores, so no processing time was wasted in the whole action. Another thing that I liked was the fact that it uses the idle resources of the CPU. I could use this Mac without any trouble while the archiving program took all the available CPU time. I can't say this about 7xZ though.

The second stress test was with the same folder, but this time by using a strong Blowfish 448-bit encryption, using its encoding capabilities, and 6% error correction level. The output was a little bigger, but with the error recovery capabilities and strong encryption at the same time. Quite good for a archiver that's considered to be average.

The StuffIt Standard contains StuffIt Expander, an application that decompresses multiple archive types. This application is available free. The latest version of StuffIt Expander has a better startup speed. The users of the old version know that even when decompressing a small file, it takes too much time while the application loads itself. This version gets close to The Unarchiver from the performance point of view.

I tried to decompress the huge archive that was the result of the stress test. It did its job pretty well, using the same amount of full idle resources as the compression part. What I didn't like was the fact that when it processed the audio files (some mp3 and wma files) within that archive the application was stuck and it did its job very slow. The Unarchiver does a better job here.

Pluses: the support for various archive formats, the Expander is available for free, and it has a better performance with this version, it uses all the available resources both for archiving and decompressing, it has the support for various encryption types, it can store error correction data, it has the support for optimizers, and block mode.

Drawbacks / flaws: it can crash without any known reason since I couldn't replicate that crash, the Expander isn't perfect when decompressing certain file types.

In conclusion: there are both things that I like or I don't like about this archiving tool. Since the multi-core machines are the future, I appreciate the support for this kind of technology. This can't make the old users forget that this 'new' version is in fact a 10.X bumped version. Maybe the producer should innovate more, beside fixing and releasing new 'major' versions, because this one looks more like a minor update rather than a major update as the numbers say.

System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.3 or later.