Tue, Jan 29, 2008, 5:41pm
Unstuffing the Archives
Computers » Mac
I
was never happy with the strange monopoly that the program Stuffit had over the Mac world up until OS X came along. It was obvious to early adopters that it meant the end for this archiving format, though it took several iterations of the OS before Stuffit Expander was no longer pre-installed. I'm happy that it's become rare for people to distribute files in this format anymore. But look! My software and file archives are filled with them. Yikes! Never trust that you'll always be able to unpack things in formats that are going away.
The time has come to unstuff them all, re-stuffing them into some other format if need be.
PS: Eek! Look at all these .cwk files too!
Aside: Why am I so happy to have all .sit and .sitx files off my machine finally? As far as customer politics goes, while Stuffit provided a service for the Mac users in the 80s/90s, they became more and more pushy with their sales pitches to upgrade users to their pro wares. At one point, it became a trying maze to figure even how to download the free Expander program from their site. Even now, to download the free Expander, you have to give them your name and email address and agree to receive periodic mailings.
But the question looming over them always was: Why? Why pay for file compression anymore? There were so many perfectly fine formats out there, and most of them for free. They survived as long as they did, because they were able to get bundled onto each new Mac, like IE used to be, to become the default. Well, I'm glad it's all over with. Smith Micro Software (the current owners of StuffIt) can jump off a cliff for all I care now.
The time has come to unstuff them all, re-stuffing them into some other format if need be.
PS: Eek! Look at all these .cwk files too!
Aside: Why am I so happy to have all .sit and .sitx files off my machine finally? As far as customer politics goes, while Stuffit provided a service for the Mac users in the 80s/90s, they became more and more pushy with their sales pitches to upgrade users to their pro wares. At one point, it became a trying maze to figure even how to download the free Expander program from their site. Even now, to download the free Expander, you have to give them your name and email address and agree to receive periodic mailings.
But the question looming over them always was: Why? Why pay for file compression anymore? There were so many perfectly fine formats out there, and most of them for free. They survived as long as they did, because they were able to get bundled onto each new Mac, like IE used to be, to become the default. Well, I'm glad it's all over with. Smith Micro Software (the current owners of StuffIt) can jump off a cliff for all I care now.