Product Reviews

Previously known as StuffIt Deluxe, Allume's archive software has changed its name to ZipMagic. It supports both Zip and StuffIt archives, and the Zip Folder part of the application integrates with Windows Explorer.

ZipMagic lets you browse Zip files as you would any other Windows folder. You can open a file in a Zip archive directly from any application without having to extract it first. The support goes so deep into Windows that archived images even appear as thumbnails.

While this works really well, it's a shame that the same level of support isn't offered for the software's

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own StuffIt archives. StuffIt compression is technically superior and can now compress JPEG files, which other archives don't deal with as well.

ZipMagic's documentation claims 30 per cent compression, but we saw an average of 23 per cent. It's useful if you're emailing or transferring large numbers of files, but unless you create self-extracting archives the recipient will also need a copy of ZipMagic.

Unfortunately, you can't browse StuffIt archives as though they were folders. The nearest thing to this Allume provides is a thumbnail browser application that lets you view images stored in a StuffIt file before you extract them. It takes a good few mouse clicks to get to this point and misses the simple integration that Zip files have with Zip Folders.

Other than this, the software is very similar to its predecessors. It has a simple drag-and-drop mode for creating archives, plus a full console in which you can schedule tasks. While the photo compression works well, it's a shame that it's not integrated with Windows. If you work with a lot of compressed archives it's a good choice; otherwise we'd stick with the far simpler and cheaper WinZip.