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Fellow indie developer Paul Kafasis at Rogue Amoeba and his team have set up a great holiday deal for you: MacSanta. Every day through December 24th you get a 20% discount on the applications from five Mac developers. Today, December 22nd, is my day. So, quick, run to the store and grab as many BetterZip licenses as you can.

The secret password you need to whisper into Santa's ear is MACSANTA07.¹ And don't miss the other great applications on the MacSanta page. Happy holidays everyone!

¹ Translation to adult-ish: Please, enter the discount code MACSANTA07 into the field on the checkout page.

Update: I'll leave the discount code valid through December 24th.

So, I have been busy the last week, implementing everything you wished for since the last release. Well, nearly everything. I have added the most excellent prototype.js framework and the spectacular script.aculo.us effects library and a little Javascript and CSS magic of my own to recreate the outline view (the tree thingy) we are used from the Finder in HTML. Neat. It's of course much slower than the tree in BetterZip or in the Finder when opening/closing folders in large archives, but it's there if you need it.

I have added a configuration panel which lets you set various aspects of the file list. I had the intention to save the settings in a cookie, but unfortunately cookies do not work in Quick Look generators. So, the settings will be reset every time. To soothe your suffering I have added a configuration file in the bundle where you can easily set your preferred options. Read all about it in the Read me, please file or on the brand new product page.

You can quickly download it here.

As always, I am looking forward to reading your feedback.

Don't you wish Leopard's Quick Look would let you inspect the contents of compressed archives? Well, I do, so I took a little code from BetterZip, a template from Apple's Xcode, added a little code here and there, and after simmering this soup for three days the BetterZip Quick Look Generator is ready for a public tasting. Hot!

The currently supported archive formats are: ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ARJ, LZH, ISO, CHM, CAB, CPIO, RAR, 7-Zip, DEB, RPM, StuffIt's SIT, DiskDoubler, BinHex, and MacBinary.

Download it here, unpack, and after carefully studying the License Agreement for the next two weeks, copy the BetterZipQL.qlgenerator bundle to your /Library/QuickLook folder (if you want to install it for all users on your Mac) or to the ~/Library/QuickLook folder, this is the Library/QuickLook folder inside your user folder. You may need to create the QuickLook folder inside ~/Library first.

The Quick Look framework will need a little time before it realizes that a new generator has been added. If you are impatient and not afraid of using the terminal, you can execute this command to make the Quick Look framework reset immediately: qlmanage -r

Last and best of it all: It's free!

This version should finally solve all the problems with setting BetterZip as default handler for the various archive file types. For some users (it didn't affect everyone) this was really annoying. If you still experience problems with that, please let me know.

The second bug I fixed is the re-saving of SIT archives in some other format which didn't work in the latest version.

Of course, there were a few things not working smoothly on the new Mac OS X 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard. Most annoying was that Apple changed the identifications for many archive types like zip, and BetterZip did not know about this change and could not be used as default handler for these archive types. At least not without fiddling. The type system was not really predictable in Tiger, and unfortunately, the situation hasn't improved with the new operating system.

For best results start BetterZip, open the preferences, go to the tab File Types, click the Handle None button and then either click the Handle All button or select which file types BetterZip should handle using the check boxes in the list. This does not necessarily change the icons of all zip files to the BetterZip icon. Restarting the Finder might help, but not in all cases. If you have set an archive to open with another archiver, this archive will still not open in BetterZip and have the other archiver's icon. Or not. Unpredictable. Maybe Mac OS X 10.6 will solve the problem.

If you still have problems with associating BetterZip with some archive types, let me know. And if you know of any solutions or tricks for this, please, please, pretty pleeeeease, share your wisdom with us. Thanks!

Like with every release, find all changes in the version history.