t might surprise you to learn that among the few software packages I pay for you will find a zip utility. This could be surprising because there are so many free zip utilities out there. The thing is, I really like this one.
BitZipper 4.1 is one fo the better tools for zipping I’ve used. It lets you combine many files into a single file that takes up less space than the total of all the files combined. Zip files are useful for transmitting a set of files (especially text, which compresses down to very small sizes) all at once.
One of the features that I really like about BitZipper is that it can (in classic mode) show the contents of more than one zip file at a time. Instead of having more than one WinZip window open, I can have a single BitZipper with a tab for each zip file.
BitZipper also displays a folder tree. Zip files can maintain the folder structure of files that were added to it. When you decompress the zip file, it restores the folders. Sometimes, though, you might want to decompress a single folder form an archive than contains many folders. Using BitZipper, you just drag the folder from the BitZipper window to the place in Explorer that you want to extract the folder. The single folder and all of its contents are unzipped with path information in-tact. Very cool.
I wrote the author of BitZipper and he responded that he liked a feature that I requested. It is actually very difficult to create archives with directory structures that make sense. Usually, you have to zip an entire directory structure from the file system and remove the files from the archive that youdon’t want to include. This is tedious. My suggestion was to allow the building of virtual folders in BitZipper. This would make application deployment so much easier; it’s difficult to relay exactly how much.
Another thing that BitZipper does well is it allows you to unzip via OLE. This is a complex programming term, but it’s easily explained. You know how sometimes the zip archive you download contains only one file that you want? And you want to view that file with an application that isn’t the default application for that file? Or, you have that application and double-clicking the file would open another instance of the application? Well, with BitZipper, you can drag the file directly from the BitZipper window to the window of your application. You don’t need to unzip to a temporary file!
BitZipper was a good find. It doesn’t support ever compression option out there (bz2 is one that I hope that it picks up soon), but it does support 18 formats, which covers the common ones. The author is clearly continuing development on the software, and I look forward to seeing new features as they develop. Check out BitZipper!
