BetterZip 2 - The Next Generation of Archiving

Robert, 2011-06-22 12:23:34 +0200

A bold headline, but I am incredibly proud of the new version and finally getting it out into the world and into your hands. It was a lot of work for me and a long time of waiting for you, but I think it was worth the effort and the patience.

Upgrades for current license owners are $9.99 per license. To give you the chance to switch to the Mac App Store, if you prefer, for a limited time the price in the Mac App Store will be $9.99 as well. For customers who bought BetterZip on or after September 1st, 2009 the upgrade is free. Woohoo!

The list of new features is rather long, so let me introduce you to the most important ones here. I have sorted them in order of importance (for me).

A new user interface

BetterZip sports a clean new user interface which will look familiar to most Mac users. Similar to the Finder it has a sidebar on the left side into which you can drop your favorite folders for archives, e.g., your downloads folder. This favorites list is populated using Spotlight and can be filtered very fast.

Quick Look

In addition to the preview (which was also greatly enhanced), BetterZip 2 has Quick Look built-in. Just select a file and press the spacebar.

The BetterZip 2 archive operations queue

BetterZip 2 has a queue for executing multiple archive operations in an ordered way. You can let Mac OS X decide how many operations to run at the same time or set it manually.

A powerful archive password manager

The new archive password manager helps you work with encrypted archives like no other archiver does. You can have BetterZip collect a list of archive passwords in your keychain. These can be used automatically whenever you open an encrypted archive. Alternatively, BetterZip can display them in a list in the password panel, so you can easily choose the one to use.

Edit and update archives

When you open a file in an archive with the View command and edit it with an external editor, BetterZip 2 will detect the changes and give you the option to update the archive.

Presets

BetterZip 2 allows you to create presets for creating and extracting archives. Presets collect all settings that can be applied to an archive, from the destination folder and archive format, to passwords and even a script to execute after the operation completed.

Services

BetterZip 2 offers two configurable services, one for creating and one for extracting archives. Choose a preset for each which can be started through the Services menu, the Finder contextual menu and it can even be given a shortcut key.

Test archives

Quickly test an archive without extracting it to find out whether it is damaged.

More super-ultra power features

BetterZip 2 can filter out extracted files similar to archive creation time cleaning. No more Thumbs.db and other unwanted stuff from other systems!

Add custom options to archiving operations, e.g., specify the dictionary size or build solid archives. Or, if you don’t care about these techy details, let BetterZip choose the best options.

There are many more enhancements. See them while you use the new BetterZip.

64-bit

Yes, BetterZip is completely 64-bit now.