New Winzip in the Works

flufster writes "Today WinZip released a public beta version of WinZip 10.0, the latest version of the popular archiving software. The biggest change in this version is that the software has finally been broken into two versions - Standard and Professional, offering paying users additional functionality in the Professional version, while allowing others to use the Standard edition without an annoying nag screen. Version 10.0 has a revamped interface designed to mimic XP's Windows Explorer, and claims to zip archives faster. The software now supports the PPMd and bzip2 compression formats, and can burn from zip archives directly to writable optical media such as CDs and DVDs. The main addition to the Pro edition is an automation feature called 'WinZip Job Wizard' which allows scheduled archiving instructions to be set. Almost all the other features we're used to now come completely free in the Standard edition."

Superior, free alternative

[Solder Fumes]

My favorite window archiving tool: http://www.izarc.org/ [izarc.org]

I guess 7-zip is popular too. Regardless, Winzip is yesterday's news.

Re:What about rar?

[BoomerSooner]

Or you could just get WinRar [rarlabs.com]. Free upgrades and a better format to boot.

Windows Zip utilities, huh?

[gusnz]

Here's some good freeware ones:

7-Zip [7-zip.org]

A free, open source Windows zip utility with support for several archive formats, and comparatively great compression. Small and fast too; it's my personal choice at the moment.

IZArc [izarc.org]

Not open source, but supports a few more formats

ICEOWS [iceows.com]

Formerly ARJFolder, integrates very cleanly into Windows Explorer.

There's more out there, but really, I can't see how Winzip is as relevant today as it was during the Win3.x days when it was the only good zip GUI out there. I guess scheduling is nice, but then again, all operating systems come with a schedular these days anyway.

Others

[Saiyine]

Althought really obsolete, WinZip is extremely popular with uneducated computers users.

I, for one... recommend these alternatives: winrar [rarlab.com] and winace [winace.com], wich are vastly superiors in performance, but shareware, and 7-Zip [7-zip.org] wich has good perfomance with a poor interface, but it's free.


--
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Re:Who needs it

[makomk]

Agreed - 7-zip rocks. It seems to be able to open almost every archive format - I even use it under Linux sometimes (via Wine). What I'd like to know is why the hell it took so long for WinZip to get bzip2 support - I've found it really inconvenient, and it seems to be the last archiver to support the format.

Re:Superior, free alternative

[JPriest]

I have tested almost every other app people have suggested to me and WinRAR [rarlabs.com] still leads the way.

Re:Multiple Zip Files

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except for the fact that command won't work.

Re:Superior, free alternative

[moonbender]

Agreed. The explorer integration is just great. Typically I don't even have to see the program, I just right-click drag, extract here. Options like extract in subfolder and, when dragging more than one archive, extract each into its own subdirectory are cool too, invaluable if you need them.

Actually, that's all I need of a compression software. 7zip is not terrible, either, but with the most recent version I tried - a month or so ago - the explorer integration wasn't there yet. It had an "Extract..." entry in the context menu, but as the ellipsis indicates, it opens up a dialog which requires you to type in or select the target folder. Which takes an eternity compared to just dragging to a folder which I typically have open anyway.

Re:Makes sense.

[keraneuology]

From TFA:

Caution, WinZip 10.0, when it is released, will not be a free upgrade. If you are a registered user of a previous version of WinZip and install WinZip 10.0, you will no longer be registered.

In other words, all of those people who were promised free upgrades way back when are now SOL. Yes, WinZip has the right to change their terms any time they want and have no obligation to continue to provide free upgrades, power to them.

But I don't have to continue to support their company. Their "upgrade assurance" program is cute, though... for an extra 20% you can receive assurances that if a new version of WinZip comes out within the next year you'll get a copy. They've been averaging a new version what, every two? three? years? How many people are going to fall for that one?

Re:Superior, free alternative

[Quarters]

IZarc is free and supports pretty much every compression format. But, for me at least, it constantly barfs a hairball when I try to drag-n-drop a file out of an archive that is in a nested folder. The only way to get at the file in that instance is to unpack the entire archive and then navigate to the file in Explorer. Neither WinZip, WinRar, nor 7-Zip have this problem.

Re:Funny

[Solder Fumes]

Perhaps this is because Opera is not a steaming pile of shit, while it could be argued to be the case for Winzip.

Re:/. readers should care about WinZip because...

[dskoll]

I have no problem with software evolving. The problem is that deflate64 is a proprietary, undocumented compression algorithm (unlike the previous ZIP algorithms.) The only way to make an interoperable implementation is through reverse-engineering, and given the state of copyright law in the USA today, that's a dangerous prospect for Free Software.

Re:What about rar?

[araemo]

Stuffit is unneeded. It was a niche product to support the resource fork + data fork when transmitting/storing the file on mediums that do not support a resource fork(IE, putting it on a unix FTP server or sending it as an attachment to a usenet post, etc). Now that the resource forks are mostly unneeded, partially duplicated in a 'file' that tar can roll up, and becoming deprecated in general... Apple started using .dmg disk images to distribute stuff! ARRRGH! :P Admittedly, it's a wonderful installation method as far as end user experience goes, but it is hardly cross platform compatible.

This is new? I've had it since 1997

[mimarsinan]

I wrote my first archiver, called CompreXX, back in 1997. It had the exact "new" Explorer interface that's the big deal in WinZip 10 now, 8 years later.

In 1999 I added plug-in extensibility to the product, so it could be extended to support more archives while keeping the same UI.

In 2002, I made the product manage archives natively in Windows Explorer itself - just like what Windows XP does for ZIP files, except for all archive types (that plug-ins support) and all Windows platforms. Give WinZip another 8 years and they'll figure that one out.

CompreXX right now natively compresses ZIP, RAR, ACE, SIT, 7ZIP (7ZIP has the best compression), and 28 total archive formats. It extracts 48. Of course, because I do not have a multimillion dollar marketing budget, there is nothing I can do to get the word out about it.

And reading about WinZip's revolutionary "new" features, especially on Slashdot, is really depressing.

Re:Superior, free alternative

[izomiac]

Actually a lot of free programs do that. I haven't used WinZip in years because I found freeware alternatives that would extract/create more types of archives (RAR for instance) and have more features (like renaming a file in an archive, repairing corrupt files, or scheduling backups). In the last 6 years I've used several such programs, FilZip, ZipGenius, and TugZip that I can remember. AFAIK they all have that level of explorer integration and can extract about 20 types of archives (and compress to about 7). ZipGenius, for instance, is giving me options (in a subdirectory of my context menu on multiple zip files) to add to a Downloads.zip file, add to an archive with options, add to any zip archive, create & e-mail archive, extract all here, extract all to..., extract here in separate folders, extract all to... in separate folders, and compress to 7-zip. TugZip is giving me a few less options (but still has extract in subfolders) but also has an option to convert them to self extracting archives.

Re:Superior, free alternative

[doublem]

Yeah, the old versions were less than spectacular.

If context menus were the main barrier for you, then you might want to give it another try. There are now "Add to Archive" and "Extract To" context menus that work nicely in Windows.

Tell you what, I'll give IZarc a fair shot if you try 7-zip again. :)

Re:Windows Zip utilities, huh?

[Cunk]

I'd like to join in on the effort of pointing out the irrelevance of WinZIP by mentioning my favorite free compression utility: TUGZip (http://www.tugzip.com/ [tugzip.com]) (not open source).

Re:What about rar?

[Viceice]

"RAR itself is fine. It spliting up RAR archives into multiple files that annoy me.

And then there is the different extentions:

rar, r##, part##.rar etc.."

-1 Troll

Zip is also capable of splitting it's archive, why don't you complain about that too?

Anyway, people split RARs for good reason. It's so that if during a massive download you have a small bit that doesn't stand up to CRC, all you need to do is redownload the segment that went bad instead of maybe 4.7gb all over again.

Re:This is new? I've had it since 1997

[mimarsinan]

www.CompreXX.com

Re:This is new? I've had it since 1997

[mskfisher]

Here it is in clickable form:

http://www.CompreXX.com/ [comprexx.com]

No support for Unicode

[clamx]

Winzip 10 is still unreliable since it still doesn't support Unicode filenames [fenarinarsa.com]. Use WinRAR or 7-zip instead.

Then zlib should fix it, they have the means.

[Anonymous Coward]

7-Zip supported deflate64 months ago, and it's open source.

Re:7-Zip

[m50d]

I have in a pretty similar situation, I was compressing 1.4gb of various binary data in the hope of getting it onto a cdr. Zip and gzip I didn't even bother with (no, ok, I did try them, they sucked, about 1.2gb). 7-zip and ace were better but pretty bad, about 8-900mb each. Arj got it down to about 706mb, just too much without overburning. Rar blew them all away, compressed it down to just over 550mb. Took two hours to do though.

Re:7-Zip

[Lagged2Death]

I believe RAR does what they call "solid archiving," which means that a single compression dictionary is created for the entire archive.

ZIP doesn't do that; each file in a ZIP archive is compressed individually, with a separate compression dictionary. That hurts the compression ratio for ZIP archives that contain many files, particularly many small files, particularly many similar small files, like source code, for example. But it does mean that archive operations (like extracting or updating individual files or and adding files to or removing files from an archive) are fast and simple.

It's possible, in some cases, to dramatically increase the compression ratio ZIP achieves by ZIPing twice, emulating the "solid archive" method. (This is also what using .tar.gz does.) For the first ZIP, specify "no compression" (sometimes called "archive only") for the degree of compression desired. No compression dictionary will be created. Then ZIP that uncompressed ZIP file, using maximum compression this time. Since you're compressing just one file, only a single compression dictionary will be created. Especially for files that have a lot of similarity to each other (like human-language text or computer-language text), there's a big savings in using a single dictionary.

I tried this with some source code archives and reduced ZIPs from (IIRC) ~150KB to ~90KB. Not really a worthwhile absolute savings, these days, but a huge improvement, percentage-wise. I also tried this with the Windows distribution of Emacs (which is distributed as .tar.gz.). ZIP managed ~17MB, double-ZIP managed ~12MB - slightly smaller than the .tar.gz distro, in fact.

Doing this is a little clumsy, but it can offer a much-improved compression ratio in a format that virtually every Windows user already has access to.

Re:7-Zip

[LnxAddct]

You should give 7-zip's own file format set on "Ultra" for the compression ratio, by far the best in the industry.
Regards,
Steve

Re:has it got any new features

[Badfysh]

I've been trying out Tugzip. [tugzip.com] Free, no nag screens, supports almost any format including rar, pretty nice.

Re:WinRAR 3.50 recently released, fyi

[Boarder2]

There's a little known tool in the Microsoft Download Center that lets you mount an ISO as a virtual CDROM. You can get it here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/6/7b6ab d84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2/winxpvirtualcdcont rolpanel_21.exe [microsoft.com]

Re:-1, buy an ad.

[masterzora]

Another one of the reasons people switched away from Altavista/Lycos/etc to Google was because Google's service was actually superior.

Unfortunately today, Digg falls far short of this. The dupes are far worse than at Slashdot. Way worse. The amount of non-tech, non-news, and general crap is usually a lot greater than the amount of releveant tech news. A lot greater. We may complain about Slashdot, but at Digg the problems are worse. And to say that they don't have any ad submissions hit front page is laughable (this [digg.com], for example, is currently front paged and it's no different from this post except the software). Of course, even if there were a complete lack of ads, it would be far overshadowed when you have a story like Bill Gates's House on Google Maps [digg.com]. And, of course, the comments there are hardly worthwhile.

So, sure, Digg is a nice little curiosity. But as a Slashdot replacement it fails in far short. Complain about Slashdot all you want, but the reality is that it is not as bad as we say, and it's nowhere near as bad as Digg.

Hmm

[Sonic McTails]

While it's more common on Macintosh, I use Stuff Expander [stuffit.com] for Windows. It opens almost anything thrown at it, and it doesn't need the proper extension so it can open mystery files as well. It works in the background and the only time you see any windows from it when you explicately open it, or when it's decompressing.

I used to use WinZip back in the day though, and it was realible, and quick, so maybe it's time to re-evaluate it.

Re:Who needs it

[elmartinos]

You do not need to use wine, there is also a native linux port for 7zip [sourceforge.net].

Re:7-Zip

[bigbigbison]

I haven't tried the method that you suggest, but 7zip, using zip compression can routinely create archives smaller than winzip by using the paramater pass=4 and the archives are compatable with any program that will open zips. I'm not sure if this would beat your method, but since it is one step rather than two it is worth trying.

Re:has it got any new features

[MasterSLATE]

My weapon of choice is power archiver. It supports just about everything I would ever come across, for both compressing and uncompressing

PAQ and UCL

[apankrat]

You should've given PAQ [fit.edu] a try too. From what I understand PAQ compression uses adaptive switching between multiple compression algorithms on the fly based on which produces the best result for a current block. Be warned that it is pretty slow and memory intensive.

Another one to try is UCL [oberhumer.com] . This is a compression engine behind UPX [sourceforge.net], executable file compressor. It has a remarkable property of having super-fast decompression.