Sixty Five, Ltd.

Not only UNO is a great utility for Mac users who think their computer’s interface should be more consistent, but it also proved to be a great testing ground for the compression technologies offered by 7zX. Here are the results of our work:

Disk Image (uncompressed):
121.9 MB (127.862.807 byte)

Disk Image (standard compression):
8.7 MB (19.649.231 byte), 15% of original file

Disk Image (7z compression):
2.7 MB (2.802.539 byte), 2% of original file

And here is a picture summing up the situation, courtesy of Keynote.

Of course, not every file is going to achieve such a level of compression, but at least we know that something can be reduced to a 2% of its original size.

I decided to post a small update for the 1.4 series before moving to the heavy stuff.

The latest release of 7zX supports Growl, a powerful notification system for Mac OS X, and fixes a minor bug which could (once again) affect the creation of Self-Extracting Archives.

Download (Mirror 1)

Although it took me a good amount of time, because of (#1) vacations, (#2) summer work as a PHP coder and (#3) university, version 1.5 of my compressor, 7zX, is finally becoming a reality.

I just distributed version 1.5b1 to a first batch of trusted testers, in order to collect as many opinions as I can regarding stability, the new features, and whatever else can come to their minds. If everything goes as I planned, you will be able to download the final release in a few days.

In the mean time, I’m going to perform some more optimizations, and probably work on some extra features.

I finally updated the Products section of this site. Who knows what you could find in there?

Richard Cornelius had some problems with the archive encryption feature of my compression tool, 7zX. The good news are, before I could reply to his eMail, he found out the solution to his problem by himself!

I’m posting the body of his message on this page, hoping that it can help people which are currently having his problem. You can discuss this message in the comments section of this post.

I discovered that once I have selected the folder/file to be compressed and encrypted, I MUST keep the “P” key depressed and carry the selected folder/file to the 7zX icon and wait until the password window comes up asking me for the password for that particular folder/file. Once that has happened I release the “P” key and type in my password. 7zX then does its stuff correctly and I get a sZip folder/file. I trashed the original folder/file just see if I could bring the compressed folder/file back to normal again. I discovered that, again, after I have selected the compressed folder/file, it’s necessary for me to keep the “P” key depressed as I drag the compressed folder/file onto the 7zX icon. I discovered that the “P” needs to be depressed until the password window comes up. After that has happened, I just type in my password and the folder/file becomes the original again.

Ever heard about “Trusted Computing”? If not, make sure that you visit our related link. You can find it on the left sidebar of this site.

We need your help to prevent evil companies from deciding what you can and what you cannot do with your computer!

Once again, I’m going on vacation. This year I will be visiting the Isola d’Elba (Italy).

This means that I won’t be able to access my Mac for about two weeks. You shouldn’t expect new releases of 7zX, and I won’t be able to provide instant replies to any support requests.

Unlike the past years, I will be carrying with me a HP Compaq nx9010 (ach!) with Windows XP Professional and various Service Packs (ach!!), so you may be able to hear something from me after all.

This release fixes a critical bug introduced with version 1.4.1, which would prevent archive encryption and SEA creation from working correctly. It is recommended that you immediately update 7zX.

Download (Mirror 1)

Here is another release of 7zX, with a completely rewritten Software Update engine. You can now decide to ignore certain updates. We cannot see a reason for doing that, but someone asked us to insert this specific feature.

We recommend that you always keep your copy of 7zX updated to the latest release, in order to make sure that the data you are going to compress/decompress remains safe.

Download (Mirror 1)