I don’t know why, but there’s something wrong about Mac OS X and archives. As you may know Mac OS comes with an application called Archive Utility installed by default, and it’s pretty good when it comes to opening simple .zip archives. Problem is, Archive Utility totally sucks when the file isn’t encoded in zip or it’s a password protected archive. And if you consider that most of the files I download are encrypted .zip’s and .rar archives, you realize that I have a problem. So I decided to try something else. I installed the popular Unarchiver, good for .rar files, but unable to join split archives. I was about to give up.
Fast forward to this morning, my friend Dietmar from Green & Slimy sends a tweet about an app he’s been working on and that’s in beta: it’s called Rucksack. I open the link, I see a sexy website saying “the new iArchiver” and “…the new way to handle archives”. I download the .zip file. I unarchive it with Archive Utility. For the last time.
Rucksack’s UI is somehow very similar to Thoughts.app (by Green & Slimy): it’a black window spotting the same love for glowing and colorful icons, with crisp text and beautiful animations. Guess Dietmar has his personal style now. The app is anyway produced by CreativeBe, the developers of Renamer and iArchive. I’ve never tried iArchive, but if Rucksack it’s the new iArchive, I’d rather focus on this.
Rucksack lets you open and create archives without limitations. To get the idea of how much powerful this app is, let’s take a look at the supported formats:
Zip
RAR (rar, r00, r01, r02, …)[read only]
7zip (7z, 7z.001, 7z.002, …)
Apple disk image (dmg)
Tar
Tar Gzip (tar.gz, tgz)
Tar Bzip2 (tar.bz2, tbz)
Tar Z (tar.Z)
CPIO (cpio)
ACE [read only]
ARJ [read only]
CAB [read only]
LhA (lha, lzh) [read only]
StuffIt (sit) [read only]
StuffIt Expander Archive (sea) [read only]
BinHex (hqx) [read only]
MacBinary (bin, macbin) [read only]
Linux RPM (rpm) [read only]
PAX [read only]
Amiga disk file (adf) [read only]
Compressed Amiga disk file (adz, ADZ) [read only]
Amiga DMS disk archive (dms, DMS) [read only]
Amiga LhF (f, F) [read only]
Amiga LZX (lzx) [read only]
Amiga DCS disk archive (dcs) [read only]
Amiga PackDev (pkd) [read only]
Amiga xMash disk archive (xms) [read only]
Amiga Zoom disk archive (zom) [read only]
HA archive [read only]
It’s a huge list. Almost every file format you could ever ask for it’s there. The cool thing is, everything is simple and painless. To open an archive, you can either click on Open with in the Finder’s contextual menu or just drop it onto the icon: a sexy animation and a sound notification will inform you that the file was sucecsfully processed and that you can now enjoy your unarchived file. I just can’t write more about it: it’s simple, it’s a two steps process.
As for the “create archive” feature, you can choose between many options: various formats, password encrypted file, split archive for large files. You can also create a .dmg file, but there’s no support for password here. The whole process is rather fast, but I believe it’s gonna be even faster as the app will leave the beta status.
Rucksack is very promising. It’s still in a beta stage, which means things will be refined and optimized by the public release. But this doesn’t matter, because Rucksack it’s already a great app which you should look forward to if you’ve been wondering if there was a better way to handle archives on Mac OS X.
You can download the beta version here, give it a spin and sign up to the newsletter to get a 10% off when the app will be available.
