In compressed form, it zips up your files. But you probably guessed that…
Archiving and unzipping files is something OS X already does well on its own, and free tools like The Unarchiver have filled in most of the gaps already. Archiver 2’s £14 price tag is for execution rather than features, and its question of “Who says working with archives needs to be complicated?” best answered with “Nobody… since 1997.”
Needless to say, it can extract from just about every format out there, although it’s restricted to compressing into ZIP, 7ZIP, and various flavours of TAR. It also has its own format, which you’ll never use because nothing else supports it. Without that, there seemed no difference in compression size between its default and the built-in OS X archiver app, though you can crank Archiver’s compression up a notch at the expense of a slight wait.
The main benefits here are having a drag-and-drop window for easy previewing, and some handy options such as stripping out Mac system files. The window could do more, though, like opening files in non-default apps rather than having to unzip them first, and there’s no way to add or remove files from an existing archive.
Archiving and unzipping is easier than with much of the competition, but isn’t much more powerful if your needs extend beyond basic compression and unzipping. And at this price, a little more power doesn’t seem too much to ask.
Verdict:
Handy tweaks to a largely trivial process, but whose additions never get close to essential.
Pros/Cons:
- Drag-and-drop window
- Solid set of file options
- Pricey for its limited benefit
- No editing for archives
Price: £14
Developer: Incredible Bee
OS: OS X 10.6 and later
Requires: 24MB HD