All right, Macintosh users!
Tell me what your experience with 7zX has been. Have you only recently discovered the potential of this small utility or did you follow the development since the very first beta?
What do you especially like in 7zX? What hopes do you have for the near future? Ask, and you shall receive. 
Great work on this application (which I just discovered)!
I’m the guy who compiled the 7za binary you include here, so I know a bit about 7-zip myself.
I have a couple of suggestions:
* Preference to set archive type and compression rate.
* Preference to use ‘Safe 7-zip format’ -> Yes/No as default.
Hi there,
first, I would like to congratulate you on the excellent work you have
done with the making of 7zX. In my own personal endeavor to write a
7-zip capable and easy compression program, I stumbled on your program
and thus realized that you already had done all this great work!
But, on your website you asked for comments, so I’ll give you some comments.
* Why not make your program open source? I would love to see your
code as I’m panning on maybe writing a book on compression and because
I’m learning XCode at the moment (and I do guess you wrote this code
in Xcode, didn’t you?)
* The progress bar is there, but it isn’t really useful. I would love
to see the time it takes to complete and how much time has passed
since the start.
* Don’t make a safe 7-zip unless the user explicitly turns on the
option in your program. This makes it a really straight forward user
experience and still allows the flexibility of setting these options.
However, I believe that most people will imply use this to exchange
data with friends who use Windows and not so much with people who use
OS X.
Hope these were some helpful comments!
Nice work! Thanks for this!
Unless I’m missing something, I would like to see an easy way to password-protect an archive. A simple check box (to include a password) and then a prompt to type (and verify) the password would be great.
Thanks again!
I’m interested to know how this relates to the rest of the 7-Zip effort, as I didn’t see a link from their site to you app, which might be useful for you. I’ve used 7-Zip on my windows box for a while, and like that there’s a Mac version, buit it might be worth fleshing out the website a little more to explain what 7z is and so on.
7zX is an independent software, not connected to the official 7-Zip site.
I would like to be able to easily turn a huge directory of files into a huge directory of 7zs, like I can do with gzip. I would like to be able to mount a 7z as though it were a disk image.
I doubt you will be ever able to mount a 7z file as a disk image. You can turn a huge directory of files into a directory of 7z’s already.
7zX is very nice and introduced me to the 7z format which I now use most of the time.
However, I find myself using the command line for compression more often for a few of reasons.
1. The donate splash screen. 7zX doesn’t start processing until that screen goes away which slows things down. If we donate, is there a way to disable the splash screen?
2. No preference to set a default format. By setting a default compression format, the compression process could be sped up since there is no need to choose a format on *every* compression run.
3. No preference to set compression rate.
These preferences are essential for me if 7zX is to replace BOMArchiveHelper as my default compression app, but I do use 7zX to decompress most of the time.
Thanks for working on this app and I look forward to seeing future versions.
1. Clicking on the popup will also make it go away. Also, people who donate receive a license file that disables the reminder. People who cannot donate for a reason or another (I’m mainly thinking about students) should contact me: I’ll try to arrange something for them.
2. True.
3. True. I think the very next version of 7zX will include a Preferences section, but I can’t promise anything right now.
I love 7zX, it is able to compress a 130 MB Filemaker database to 9.1 MB, while ZIP gives me 39.8 MB, Stuffit 33.6 MB and RAR 27.6 MB.
I agree with the last comment on the compression ratio, when I compress the same Filemaker database using 7-zip on Windows using the Ultra setting, it leaves me with a 8.7 MB file.
I personally only use 7-zip through drag-and-drop on the application (a contextual menu item would be great), but for those that expect an application to stand by itself, I would suggest something similar to DropStuff: just open a window with a dropzone. Migrate the preferences to the default Preferences… menu item on OS X.
Also, the feedback part of the 7zX compression window (when you’re compressing something) just stay totally white for me, always. This is on a Powerbook G4 867. I have no clue as to what the shell is returning when using the command line version of 7z, but couldn’t you just update the progressbar by parsing the shell output? RAR for example provides a percentage both when compressing and decompressing, which can be easily parsed using regex. If 7z doens’t provide such a detailed feedback, could you just query the total number of files at startup and then update the progressbar when a new file is being compressed? If you could parse out the filename of the file being currently processed an put this above or below the progressbar, it would also provide a better indication of the current status.
But, as I said, 7zX is a great app, all I’m asking for here is some eyecandy stuff which would make it more “professional-looking”.
Keep up the good work!
Well, a modifier key to switch between Safe and normal would be even better, because I have to deal with both formats very regularly (I have a lot of friends on PC, and just as many on Macs, and 50% of what I send to my Mac friends needs to be in safe format).
First and foremost, I have to fix an important security issue. The modifier key path has been considered already, and might be implemented in the next release of 7zX.
I downloaded this to extract one specific file, but there is no way to do that since the file is password protected. You should also add a feature allowing users to view the log.
It seems like the latest version of 7z has a problem with passwords. If I compress anything with it with a password, I can open the compressed file by hitting cancel on the password dialogue.
I have version 1.6.7.
Hope this helps
- Wolf
This has been discussed before.
“7z archives are currently encrypted using the AES-256 standard. Inserting a wrong password causes 7zX to generate 0 KB files, and display CRC errors in the main window.”
I just want everyone who may be interested in performance of 7zx note my fantastic (though slow) results. I compressed a VMWare Fusion “virtual machine” (8.01 GB) and a copy of VMWare 175 MB using the “maximum” setting with resource forks and encryption enabled. I did this on a 1st gen MacBook Core Duo 2.0 in the hopes of being able to burn it to a single 4.7 DVD for back up. It took 2:05 hours! But the resulting file is now 3.61 GB!! Amazing.
I would only ask that a real “progress bar” be added. It never progressed at all. I was actually about to cancel the operation just as it finally finished. Otherwise, this has been great. Thanks.