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."

Comments

-1, buy an ad.

[QuantumG]

Oh wait, you did.

Obligatory bash.org quote Obligato Obligatory bas

[XorNand]

what should I give sister for unzipping? Um. Ten bucks? no I mean like, WinZip?

Superior, free alternative

[Solder Fumes]

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

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

Multiple Zip Files

[jdvuyk]

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...

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.

Re:What about rar?

[BoomerSooner]

Or you could just get WinRar. Free upgrades and a better format to boot.

Who needs it

[jb.hl.com]

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?

Windows Zip utilities, huh?

[gusnz]

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.

/. 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.

7-Zip

[BinLadenMyHero]

Have you tried 7-Zip?

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.