WinZip 6 for Mac

Surely that’s “MacZip” then?

$29.95 From Corel, corel.com Needs OS X 10.8 or later Mac compression utilities aren’t sexy — if they reduce file sizes and use less bandwidth, it’s a job well done. Corel brings some of the sizzle back in WinZip 6 for Mac, which now manages files as well as compacting them.

This is done from a new Files pane on the app’s left-hand side, where you browse mounted volumes, cloud storage accounts, and the last five archives accessed. Rather than dragging and dropping from Finder or using the Action menu, everything happens inside WinZip’s window, with the pane expanding into split-screen view alongside the current archive while browsing.

WinZip isn’t quite a full-fledged file manager — you can’t view two volumes side-by-side, for example — but the improvement will be welcome if you work with Zip, GZip, LZMA2, BZip, and other archive formats. Contextual menus provide a convenient peek without opening files, and you can delete and rename files from within the app. There’s also enhanced support for Zipx.

The bottom line. More convenient than ever, but no upgrade pricing.

WinZip Mac 6

Convenient new Files pane One-click access to local and cloud volumes Zipx support No upgrade pricing

Good