Product Reviews

It would take a brave user to keep their Mac free of Aladdin products, especially as the company's brilliant StuffIt Expander and DropStuff compression utilities are bundled on every machine that Apple ships. Their less well-known big brother, StuffIt Deluxe, has become the tool of choice for those with demanding file compression needs offering greater encoding and compression versatility.

The deceptively simply StuffIt Deluxe interface comprises a button toolbar that links to the common compression options. When you open a StuffIt (.sit) archive, its contents are listed in a window so you can see them before deciding to expand. A similar process applies to the creation of Stuffit archives.

Aside from the application itself, Deluxe 6.5 has a clutch of associated utilities, including an archive search tool and drag-and-drop converters. A new droplet, DropTar,

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has been added to the line-up, letting you create Unix-based tar archives directly from the desktop.

Most of the improvements made to Deluxe 6.5 are tailored for Apple's new operating system. Limited Mac OS X support was available in version 6, but Deluxe 6.5 offers improved Finder integration, even if it still lags behind its Classic counterpart. For example, command-s and command-u Finder keyboard shortcuts now work under Mac OS X 10.1, allowing you to stuff and unstuff files with a keystroke.

Some features are Classic only, such as the ability to compress files by appending the relevant extension to its file name in the Finder and the contextual menu support.

But version 6's Magic Menu, which adds many of the parent program's functions to a drop-down Finder menu, has now made the journey to OS X. Magic Menu is now instantly added to the login items list in the System Preferences folder so that it's available at all times.

Even OS X users would admit these additions alone hardly justify the upgrade price. But Aladdin has sweetened the deal, bundling a limited version of StuffIt Express, which builds workflows of common transfer and compression tasks.

If you aren't interested in useful features such as this, Deluxe 6.5 looks a more awkward upgrade. Most improvements have been targeted at the OS X version, but the Classic version remains more powerful. As a result, upgraders in either camp are unlikely to be satisfied.