StuffIt Description

StuffIt is a family of software utilities for archiving and compressing files on the Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows and Linux platforms: it was originally produced for the Macintosh and remains common on that platform. The proprietary compression format used by the StuffIt utilities is also termed StuffIt.

StuffIt was originally developed in the summer of 1987 by Raymond Lau, a high school student at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. It combined the fork-combining capabilities of utilities such as MacBinary with newer compression algorithms similar to those used in ZIP. Compared to existing utilities on the Mac, notably PackIt, StuffIt offered "one step" operation and compression ratios that could not be matched. By the fall of 1987 StuffIt had largely replaced PackIt in the Mac world, with many software sites even going so far as to convert over existing PackIt archives to save more space.

StuffIt soon became very popular and Aladdin Systems was formed to market it (the last shareware release by Lau was version 1.5.1). They split the product line in two, offering StuffIt Classic in shareware and StuffIt Deluxe as a commercial package. Deluxe added a variety of additional functions, including additional compression methods and integration into the Mac Finder to allow files to be compressed from a "Magic Menu" without opening StuffIt itself.

Features Include

• Create .zip, .sitx, .sit and .tar archives
  
• Search for files within Zips and StuffIt archives by name, date, and more
  
• Archive photos and files directly to FTP
  
• One-click compress and email
  
• Automatic preview thumbnail galleries of your images

The versions provided below are of StuffIt Classic.