Robert's blog

The new version fixes two small problems with the previous version: TAR files couldn't be opened reliably on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and the new header encryption would be dropped when re-saving an encrypted archive. Download BetterZip 1.8.3

Previous versions couldn't open tar archives on Snow Leopard. The new version fixes this.

Here's what's also new:

• BetterZip now uses pbzip2 for BZip2 compression. This parallel version can utilize multiple CPU cores resulting in faster compression.
• Showing and hiding columns can now be done through a contextual menu accessed by clicking on the header of the main table like in iTunes or other programs.
• Added optional header encryption for 7-zip and rar formats. Select this option in the save panel in the pop-up button "Encryption method".
• Integrated the latest rarlib for faster and more stable extraction of rar files.
• Various smaller bug fixes. See the version history for details.

After three years my website was starting to look a bit outdated. The stripy background pattern looked nice in 2006, but that was a looong time ago. I can't see it anymore; and I have to see it every day.

The content management system on which it was based was Drupal 4.6, the current version is 6.12. Oops, I really missed a lot of updates, but although I am a software geek, I sometimes keep to the old wisdom "never touch a running system". So, I finally decided it was time for an upgrade, and since that also meant recoding the complete layout, I made a few changes here and there. There will be more changes in the next few days, especially to the Screenshots and Documentation pages.

If you find anything not working correctly, please let me know. Thanks!

I have finally added a feature I have wanted for a long time now: concatenation of split files. BetterZip is now able to put 001, 002, ... files together that are not compressed with one of the supported archive formats.

I have also added the Russian localization by Alexandr Slavyshensky. That makes eight fully supported languages now. International! Thank you, Alexandr!

There are also a few bugs from version 1.8 that needed to be fixed. 1.8 had a lot of big changes after all. Find the details in the version history.

Please download the new version here.

Many times over the last months I received e-mails from users requesting that BetterZip should be able to move archives to the trash once they have been extracted successfully.
Many others complained that BetterZip should not pop the Finder in your face after extracting an archive. For all of you, here's a little screenshot from the new preferences window:

Furthermore, XAR archives (the format of the new Leopard installer packages) are now first-class citizens in BetterZip, i.e., you can open, extract, and create XAR archives.

He Yunxuan created a Chinese translation which is also included with the new version.

There are many bug fixes and smaller enhancements in the new version as well. Find all the details in the version history.