BetterZip 3.0

Robert, 2015-05-20

I am happy and excited to finally release BetterZip 3 today. A lot of work went into this new version, I estimate a full year, and I hope you will like it as much as I do. BetterZip 2 already looks and feels ancient when I open it now.

So, what’s new?

The biggest addition is the new Direct Mode which speeds up working with large archives by making archive preparation and recompression obsolete. The old mode that allows you to prepare archives with the safety of undo capabilities for all operations before finally saving is still around. When working with gigabyte archives however, the Direct Mode is a huge timesaver.

Next, BetterZip 3 adds a password generator which suggests strong passwords whenever you need them. It’s similar to Safari’s, but uses English words, loosely based on this thought. If you like the Safari style better, you can use that, too. But you won’t learn all the rarely used words of the English language and you won’t have funny combinations every now and then.

The popular BetterZip Quick Look Generator has now been integrated into the application. The Quick Look generator has always been and remains free to use for everyone, but there is one neat new feature that requires a BetterZip license: You can now click a file in the Quick Look panel, at which point command is handed over to BetterZip which extracts and displays the clicked file.

New in version 3 is support for XZ archives, winmail.dat files, Apple Disk Images (DMG), and ePub files.

Another new addition to BetterZip 3 is the extensive AppleScript support which lets you build workflows using BetterZip’s compression and extraction functions.

And then there are archive comments. You know that the ZIP and RAR format support archive comments, which are a special field inside the archive that can be read and edited, but which are not extracted as files. BetterZip 3 displays these comments and lets you edit them. The place for this is the sidebar on the right side that can normally show a preview of the currently selected file. When no file is selected, there is this big empty space that no one needs. Now you can edit your comments there.

Wait, there’s more: ZIP is a widely used file format and I get ninehundretandfourtyseven emails a year asking for this and that filename extension to be added to BetterZip, because they are really just ZIP files. Go to BetterZip > Preferences > File Types, scroll to the end of the list, click the field in the column “Extensions” of the row “User-Defined Archive” and add your own (comma-separated) filename extensions like so:

Cleaning… cleaning is gone, or better it’s now called Delete with Pattern. In BetterZip 3 you can enter filter patterns on-the-fly instead of configuring them beforehand in the preferences. And for simpler requirements you can use file search masks (e.g., *.txt) instead of regular expressions (which are still around as an option). Oh, and every preset has it’s own filter pattern now.

There is a lot more stuff, as always, please consult the version history.

Finally, I’d like to say a big THANKS! to everyone who helped with getting the new version to where it is now: Walter for the new toolbar icons, Koichi, Mariusz, Nicolas, Victor, Zelu, and Zhuyuan for their translation work and all the beta testers who participated, especially David, Ian, Jonathan, and Sébastien.

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