Slashdot Mirror
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."
Oh wait, you did.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
My favorite window archiving tool: http://www.izarc.org/
I guess 7-zip is popular too. Regardless, Winzip is yesterday's news.
... is this really necessary for an archiver?
What about the annoying rar format? Hope it can de/compress that.
The ability to unzip large groups of ZIP files in one action would be a lovely addition!!! I just use winrar anyway as, although it can be alot more ugly, the methods it uses are much more elegant. My 2c...
Great, an AD pretending to be an article. Not only that, it's for a Windows product on a Linux-based website!
feh. stuff.
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?
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
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.
rooooar
tar + bzip2 + mkisofs + cdrecord.
.imp, it also handles zips fine] and doesn't require me to shell out money.
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
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Now that Microsoft has incorporated an unzip utilitiy in the OS, WinZip can't profit from people who just want to unzip files.
I have 7-zip...it handles almost all archives I come across quickly and well, and to boot it just works. Why the hell would I want to go back to WinZip, which from the sounds of it is even more bloated than it was before?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Here's some good freeware ones:
7-Zip 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 Not open source, but supports a few more formats ICEOWS 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.
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
Since most people just click past the nag screen this is the sensible thing to do: Give people the basics for free, and charge for the advanced features that really are corporate time-savers and hence worth paying for.
.: Max Romantschuk
Why does the Slashdot community, one of the largest Free / Open Source communities on the Net, care when a new proprietary version of some Windows-only software comes out? Find another place to post this nonsense.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
... 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.
/. readers.
This pain-in-the-@ss aspect of the new Winzip is the most likely thing to affect
This has always been the case with software. Once a fairly mature release is in the market, with lots of useful features, they then need to make you think you need the latest features. Of course some marketing wonk writes lots of stuff that people ultimately read, and then they're convinced.
/. again?
I mean seriously, whenever I boot into Windows, Office '97 provides me with EVERY POSSIBLE word-processing feature I need.
MS has the advantage of making the OS too, so they can force you to upgrade either the OS or the application software at their whim.
Why is there an ad on
Ignore Alien Orders
Is slashdot being paid by the winzip authors to post this story ?
Yes.
how about posting a story about an opensource/free compression package ?????
Because no money changed hands.
At the top of my screen there's a bar with links to "freshmeat, sourceforge, thinkgeek,
Because money has changed hands. See how easy that was?
Does Malda and his crew care about that stuff anymore
More people visiting this site use Windows than Linux (I'm not one of them, but facts are facts). Any journalist/entertainer whose pitches fly counter to what the majority of his audience is interested in catching will fail. Linux adds to the slashdot "geek cachet" -- that's what's being marketed here, not genuine Linux news, for which there are hundreds of supeior sources.
or is this just a sleazy and easy money making operation for them ?
Sleazy? From a guy calling himself "Adult Film Producer?" Get a grip, chum. As for "easy," well, they've got to put up with idiots like you and me pissing in their pool 24/7. I doubt anyone could pay me enough to wade through the whining here on a daily basis. Hardly "easy."
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.
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.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
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.
-1, Wrong
The sentence is fine.
Why is anything anything?
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.
So much for those of us who supported them back in the mid-nineties by paying for a copy - we don't even get the "Professional" features.
Way to change your terms and conditions, WinZip.
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
We're is a contraction of 'we are', and is perfectly correct. There's nothing worse than trying to be a grammar Nazi and getting it wrong :)
Can't you, you know, make a folder?
Winzip
Winrar
Winace
Rar kicked ass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR Need i say more?
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
Winzip 10 is still unreliable since it still doesn't support Unicode filenames. Use WinRAR or 7-zip instead.
There's even a Windoze GUI (http://www.info-zip.org/WiZ.html) - 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.
Have you tried 7-Zip?
It's not slashdotted per se, it's just compressed with technology you haven't heard about before, so you don't get access to the information.
Either that, or if no-one pleads guilty I guess we can infer that the perpetrator is that anonymous coward guy.
Double the pun in one post! This calls for a -ZipIt!, Lousy compression-based humour mod :)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
I've been trying out Tugzip. Free, no nag screens, supports almost any format including rar, pretty nice.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
While it's more common on Macintosh, I use Stuff Expander 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.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
My weapon of choice is power archiver. It supports just about everything I would ever come across, for both compressing and uncompressing
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
You should've given PAQ 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 . This is a compression engine behind UPX, executable file compressor. It has a remarkable property of having super-fast decompression.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
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.
Actually, the price depends on who unzips.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.