why i don't like winzip anymore
Lately, a friend of mine had me download a rather large file from his web server. He's a musician and his latest album is nearing completion. He wanted me to hear it and send him my thoughts before he presses it. Unfortunately, after waiting for the 500 Mb download, I discovered that I couldn't access any of it. It was packaged in a ZIP file. I could see the contents - they were WAV files, as expected. But for some reason, when I double clicked on them, nothing happened. I tried to copy them out of the zipped folder onto my desktop, but nothing happened.
After a bit of frustration, I discovered that he had used a recent version of WinZip to compress the files. I am no stranger to WinZip - I've been using it for a very long time. However, I quit paying for it when Microsoft decided to include built-in zip file functionality with Windows. After all, why pay for software that comes as part of the OS?
WinZip is fighting back, though. As this file demonstrates, they are using some sort of proprietary encryption in their zipped files so that you can only open them using WinZip. What a joke. I can't stand it when companies pull these kind of tactics. I understand that they are trying to keep their software alive, but let's face it. Compressed ZIP utilities are now a dime a dozen, and I see no reason why WinZip is any better than most of the competition, short of their established namesake. I'm sure that I would be throwing a hissy fit if Microsoft went and incorporated my technology in their operating system, but I would figure out a way to bring more value to it to retain my edge over the marketplace.
Making it proprietary doesn't add value in my book.
Labels: file compression
posted by canal boy at 8:30 PM
2 Comments:
Let me agree with you in general but straighten out some minor details.
1. WinZip is a great utility and I used it for many years too.
2. The encryption standard implemented recently by WinZip is called AES and it is Open Source good cryptographic strong encryption that is used in many other archivers too (WinRar and 7zip to name a few). Microsoft and Apple do not support it yet. No wonder - it's probably 10 years project with a lot of meetings and management decisions for each of the monsters to get few 1000 lines of code in.
AES itself is good especially compared to initial zip password protection which was laughable to say the least.
3. Windows famous zip folders (and Apple BOMArchiveHandler for the matter). Highly inefficient and buggy way to handle compressed files. Did you ever try to find a file in the folder that have .zip files inside? Yes. Did you notice that straight slashes as opposite to backward slashes in some filenames? Try to double click to open file from inside archive... Nothing happens.... This is not the end of it.
Zip folders not only slow down your searches for the files. They slow down you overall system performance a lot. Any indexing service (which is slow as it is out of the box) will unzip files in the background many time over wasting your hard drive and system performance. Zip file directory is at the end of the file. But zip folders are so "un-intelligent" that in many cases they rather unzip hundreds of megabytes of useless data instead of reading the catalog only. Ever noticed the disk grinding and CPU going 100% for no reason? Turn off zipfldrs and your system will be happier.
3. There are many freeware and shareware alternatives for WinZip that will handle AES encryption.
7zip, WinRar, jZip on windows, BetterZip and The Unarchiver on Macintosh
I implemented Zipeg (freeware, open source) to work on both Mac and Windows. Zipeg is written in Java and utilizes 7zip open source core. The idea of Zipeg is never to extract anything you do NOT need. You can browse archives and see what inside before you decide what do you need. Give it a try and if you do not like it - let me know why.
Any criticism is very much appreciated.
Thanks for listening,
Leo
http://www.zipeg.com
10:21 PM
Hi Leo,
Thanks for the further clarification. Unfortunately, I had tried several of the other ZIP utilities prior to downloading the WinZIP demo, and none but WinZIP could open the file. I had tried 7Zip, WinRAR, PowerArchiver, and I think there was one called GZIP - all free or with free trials. On another occasion, I had this one file that my friend had broken down into separate ZIPs using WinZIP, and I had to reassemble them in WinZIP to get them to work.
While I am sure that many of the other ZIP utilities out there have better encryption than what is packaged with Windows, for the standard user (me), I'm not really concerned as much about encryption for security as I am with the basic ability to make large files smaller with minimal fuss. That's all I'm interested in when it comes to ZIP files - I use it for compressed files over the internet, or for squeezing more data onto a backup CDR than what would normally fit. And I would imagine that is what most users are looking for, too.
As for strange forward slashes in filenames, and trying to search through zipped folders on my PC, it isn't a problem for me, as I don't generally keep files in their ZIP folders once they make it to my desktop. I unzip them and file them where I want.
Thanks for the info, though, and I will check out your program, and maybe even post some comments here on my blog when I have had a chance to play around with it.
10:52 AM
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