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."

tar

[Anonymous Coward]

can still kick it's ass

writing to opical media...

[Anonymous Coward]

... is this really necessary for an archiver?

What about rar?

[bach37]

What about the annoying rar format? Hope it can de/compress that.

Last chance saloon

[oberondarksoul]

I've personally always quite liked using WinZip on the PC; yes, Windows has had zip capabilities built-in for a while now (I believe they debuted in Windows ME), but I've still always preferred keeping WinZip around, especially for its disk-spanning capabilities.

However, with broadband increasing in prevelance, and pendrives and CD writers becoming pretty much the norm now for home users (my parents, never the most technologically literate of users, have their own USB pendrives which they love), not to mention zip integration into just about every common OS now, is there still a place for WinZip? Even if people continue to download it, most people I know who've used it just bypass the nag screens without a second thought - how long can they survive?

So what?

[Evro]

What is this now, Pressreleasedot? I'm running WinZip 8.0 and will never upgrade it for the same reason I'll never upgrade from AIM 4.3, Acrobat 5, and Office 2000: the problem is solved and the old version does everything it should without any new useless cruft (why is Acrobat 7 ~25 megs to read PDF files? And why does it access the Internet at all?).

Did all the "old school" Slashdot editors leave or something? These new guys they have are pretty lame.

what?

[tomstdenis]

tar + bzip2 + mkisofs + cdrecord.

Wow... now I don't need "professional" tools.

Seriously, windows users come to expect nothing any more I guess. There are alternatives to "the 10th edition of twenty year old compression algorithms".

I'm sorry but honestly what the fuck is the real market for Winzip?

Even when I was a windows user I used Winimp as it is free, compresses better [when making .imp, it also handles zips fine] and doesn't require me to shell out money.

Tom

Re:What a ridiculous advertisement!

[QuantumG]

The stats still show that the vast majority of people who visit Slashdot are running Windows. But yeah, it is an ad.

Re:Last chance saloon

[Evro]

There will always be a place for a format like "ZIP" even if only for its concatenation ability. Downloading 1000 1k files ends up being more time consuming than downloading a single 1 MB file. As for WinZip itself, I don't think most businesses have migrated from Win 2000 yet, and many don't plan to, so there's probably some life left in it.

/. readers should care about WinZip because...

[dskoll]

... it supports a new "deflate64" compression that is NOT supported by zlib. As a result, clamd chokes on some ZIP files and can't scan them.

This pain-in-the-@ss aspect of the new Winzip is the most likely thing to affect /. readers.

Re:Last chance saloon

[exKingZog]

Ah, I remember the days when I was the first to get a CD-ROM drive - the hours spent when friends would bring round a stack of floppies, and we'd experiment with the PKZip options so we could copy files from a CD to floppies.

Not relevant, just brought back a rush of nostalgia...

Re:Last chance saloon

[shancock]

I agree completely. I also have used winzip from day one and this is the first upgrade that my registration number did not work on. Until this point all my upgrades have been free.

I guess this emphasises the fact that they are going to have to find a new way to generate $.

I think it may be time for me to switch. I don't feel that I should be paying for a basic utility that comes free with most apps anyway.

Funny

[mokiejovis]

I find it humorous that when Winzip hits 10.0 and starts offering free versions, /.ers start foaming at the mouth to say what a steaming heap of shit it is and OMG can you believe people BUY that when I love to use [other application] that has [other feature] and it's FREE? And then the obligatory, "slashdot sucks now, look at the ad they're running and calling it an article."

And just last week it was all lollipops and blowjobs for Opera when they turned 10 and released a free version.

WinRAR 3.50 recently released, fyi

[simetra]

This new release includes "themes", which greatly de-uglifies it. Also, it reads/writes iso's, which is cool. I don't know if winzip does that or not. Winrar has a pretty powerful CLI too, which I use to back up certain directories on my Windows machine through a scheduled task. Winzip I believe has command-line options too.

Anyway, the new WinRAR is so nice I bought a copy.

Yes, bought, as in spent money! You can do that, you know.

Re:what?

[DrXym]

tar and bzip2 are great if all you do is stuff and unstuff everything in one go and don't intend to do it often. It is fucking abysmal if you intend to use the archive a lot, such as to pull out a single file, or freshen some files but not others. The same goes for CAB files on Win32.

I use zip on Linux as much as I do on Win32. It's not as efficient as bzip2 but it's much more practical for everyday use. WinZip has a better compression algorithm in the latest copy but I'm holding off using it until it gets more widely adopted.

Re:Tip o' The Hat To Info-Zip

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I think we really ought to give a quick mention to the granddaddy of all alternative zip tools - the zip and unzip tools from the Info-Zip Foundation (http://www.info-zip.org/ [info-zip.org]). This large group of collaborators produced portable source code that has led to :

• zip & unzip being available in all our other "favourite" operating systems (just check the list of platforms on the homepage)
  
• the creation of the very wonderful zlib (http://www.gzip.org/ [gzip.org]) - now an indispensible part of almost every system everywhere - not least the Intarweb itself - phew !
  

There's even a Windoze GUI (http://www.info-zip.org/WiZ.html [info-zip.org]) - if you really want one, though I didn't like it much when I last looked at it.

All it's lacked for ages now has been diskette spanning - though, as someone else points out elsewhere in this thread, in these days of USB flash drives and CDRWs there's much less need for that.

So Big Thanks, a Tip o' The Hat and a beverage of your choice to the Info-Zip folks.

Re:So what?

[domefreak]

In response to the many comments whining about this "ad" for Windows software, allow me to offer an argument in favor of this story.

I don't use Windows (OS X, Red Hat server), but I do have to support some Windows machines on my network. One user has been asking me to buy the full version of WinZip so she doesn't have to feel guilty when using it. I have been stalling, for obvious reasons, but now I can give her links to the new free version. Even better, I got 3 free alternatives (and 2 of those are also open source) to offer her.

While the content of the ad/story isn't very interesting, I was glad to see it on /. so that WinZip can be critiqued.

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

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Here's why WinZip is more popular:

1. It's been around a lot longer than your software. The earliest reference I found in Google groups was 1991.
2. Winzip is free. What's that you say? It's not? I think I've seen a registered copy once or twice at work in the last 15 years. Winzip allows you to use the trial version forever. Does your software allow that?

From what I've read, though, you may be in luck. To increase revenue the new owners of the WinZip product will be stricter [arstechnica.com] about trial periods. I'm quite sure they don't have a multimillion dollar budget either. They have momentum; they have users. Search google for "use winzip" and see how many pages read, "to open the file, use winzip or other program..."

To start, why not put your URL with your name or in a sig? If you overlook such simple things how good can your software be?

Re:-1, buy an ad.

[rayde]

thank you for your advertisement of digg. please go away now.

this isn't an ad for winzip... it is news that this fairly ubiquitous program that we've all used at some point will now be available in a free version without nags. it's not like this article was completely without any merit.

Re:7-Zip

[Lumpy]

Yes I have and It's what I hand out to everyone. but 7zip really needs to make the user interface a bit more braindead. it's got some klunky parts that they need to fix up a bit.

I have saved many a copy of winzip from being keygened by a colleague by handing out discs with lots of freeware and OSS tools.

Re:No support for Unicode

[Midnight Thunder]

Winzip 10 is still unreliable since it still doesn't support Unicode filenames

I can remember having contacted them a year back and they said this was not a priority. Windows is now Unicode compliant, even if some programs still need to work on this (Firefox for example), but this is so stone age thinking of them.

I use the zip compressor on MacOS X and it creates the entries in Unicode. WinZip can't deal with these files. I have files, whoes filenames are in multiple languages, including Chinese and Russian, so these have be compressed without WinZip.

Re:what?

[Blakey Rat]

Here's what makes a .zip fine superior:

EVERY COMPUTER on the market right now can open a .zip file out-of-the-box without downloading any software.

That's a HUGE value-add that you're completely ignoring. It's like Fat32... sure Fat32 sucks ass as a disk format, but everything can use it without me having to install anything.

Re: Free? Says who?

[Ahnteis]

I can't see anywhere that it says this will be free?

In fact, the only "free" on the page is in this sentence:
"Caution, WinZip 10.0 is not a free upgrade."

Have I missed something burried in one of the links? I looked and I see nothing that says it'll be free.