WinZip 3
A much better way to handle your archives, albeit at a fairly hefty price
£26 Developer WinZip, winzip.com
OS OS X 10.7 or later Requires 64-bit processor
It’s rare to find an archiving tool worth paying for these days, and even WinZip struggles to find good reasons to do so. It makes a better case than most, though, with an excellent interface and some handy features for cloud users – Dropbox and Google Drive ones anyway, Apple’s iCloud is not designed for tools like this to go poking and prodding as they will.
The main interface fills a gap that the built-in OS X archiver and its many alternatives shirk, allowing ZIPs to be updated by dragging and dropping files, rather than treating the archive as a fixed thing to simply be created or extracted. WinZip is able to extract from ZIP, LHA, RAR and 7Z files and archive as ZIP, ZIPX and LHA, though it prefers its own format. One-click unzipping is available from the context menu, though the default is to open the ZIP in something approximating OS X’s standard folder views, more like the Windows ‘compressed folder’ metaphor, with a choice of views that include Cover Flow for imageheavy archives.
The cloud feature lets you add files from and extract ZIPs to your choice of destination on Dropbox/ Google Drive, which is done using their APIs rather than relying on shared folders already on your Mac.
For simply opening files, all of this is not really worth the best part of £30. Though the interface that handles the ZIP files is a huge improvement if you do regularly make receive zips with many files to sift through, or simply want a way to be able to compress large numbers of them without losing the ability to deal with them on an individual basis. Richard Cobbett One of the best archiving tools around, but at a hefty price unless you find its features essential.