Self Extracting Archives

Submitted by Stuart McHattie on Sat, 2007-06-09 12:58
in

Hi Robert,

Amazing work on betterzip. It takes a lot to make me part with my cash for software, but I feel you deserve it so I bought it last night!

One thing I was thinking, and certainly no big deal, but I would love to see the ability to make self extracting archives. I'm sure this is easier in ZIP than other formats, and to be honest, the exact formats that could do this is fairly irrelevant as long as I can make self extracting files.

It would also be nice if you could make both APP and EXEs (i.e. self extracting for either Macintosh or Windows respectively). I don't know how easy or hard this is, but I'm guessing it's easier to make an EXE than an APP for this purpose.

But apart from this, great work! Well done!

Stuart

‹ archive-to-archive drag-and-drop capability Dragging files from one Betterzip window to another Betterzip window ›
Submitted by Robert on Sat, 2007-06-09 14:28.

Thanks for registering BetterZip, Stuart! I have self extracting archives on my to-do list, but it will have to wait some time as there are other features that get requested more often.

Submitted by Tom on Fri, 2008-06-20 22:26.

thought I'd bump up this old feature request...

I also would really like to see the addition of self-extracting archives to BetterZip. I deem them especially useful when sending encrypted files to the not so tech-savvy. Unfortunately, unpacking encrypted zip, rar, and 7z archives is not supported by any of the built-in tools on Mac OS or Windows (only PKZip2 is supported by Windows). And convincing other people to install a special software for this can be quite a hassle. With self-extracting archives there's no need to worry about whether they have the right software installed.

I've recently found that 7zX offers support for self-extracting 7z archives (s7z) in .app-format. Maybe such a feature could find its way into a future version of BetterZip as well.

From a sales point of view such archives can be a subtle form of advertisement for BetterZip; they could even display something like a "created with BetterZip" Growl-notification.

Thomas

Submitted by Robert on Sat, 2008-06-21 11:14.

Thomas, thanks for your thoughts. I have this still on my to-do list, but not with a very high priority. 7zX adds 4 MB to the archive itself. So, this only makes sense for larger archives. Interesting and simple idea though.