1/25/089:50 am MacMost Now 32: StuffIt Gary Rosenzweig interviews Matthew Covington from SmithMicro at MacWorld Expo about the compression program StuffIt. You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads). Video Transcript: GARY: Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now, last week even I had a great time meeting with all these different vendors at MacWorld Expo. I'm going to be bringing you all those interviews in the next few weeks. Right now I've got one with Matthew Covington he's the director of compression solutions at SmithMicro, that means he's in charge of StuffIt, a really cool compression program it's been around for the mac forever. Let's take a look at that. GARY: Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now and I'm here with Matthew from SmithMicro and he's a StuffIt expert and tell me about StuffIt. MATTHEW: Sure StuffIt is our compression product, it goes back a long long way on the Macintosh been around since 1986 and we're still here developing today. GARY: What version are you up to now? MATTHEW: We're up to version twelve. GARY: Version twelve! I think I've been using every single one. What's, like, the latest coolest thing in version twelve? MATTHEW: Really what we're specializing in is compression within a particular file format. So for example if you take a JPEG image with version twelve we can compress it between twenty and thirty percent without reducing image quality we also have specialized compressors for TIFF files, bitmaps, PhotoShop files, PDFs, Office documents, there's a whole range of files we compress extremely efficiently. GARY: So it's specialization, so depending on the type of file StuffIt will pick the best way to compress it and use that algorithm to compress it and put it in the same StuffIt type archive. MATTHEW: That's exactly correct what we're doing is we basically sort files as they're coming into the archive and there's a whole bunch of clever tricks we can do. I mean in addition to the optimize we also have a way of, let's say you have several very very small text files you want to compress we can even do something as simple as blocking those text files together and treating them as a single large file to get more efficient compression so all kind of tricks sit under the hood with StuffIt to get the best possible compression result. GARY: Excellent and one of the things I like about StuffIt the most is the ease of use. It appears in the menu bar, it appears if you right click, and it makes it very quick to just create compressed archives, upload them to your website, just e-mail them to somebody, do whatever you need to do. MATTHEW: Absolutely and a lot of our applications, for example DropStuff now has built in FTP so you can Stuff an FTP directly from DropStuff. You can Stuff and burn CDs from DropStuff you can even Stuff an upload to your document i disk directly from within a bunch of different StuffIt applications GARY: Excellent. Well thank you very much. MATTHEW: Thank you. GARY: This is Gary and Matthew with MacMost Now. GARY: All right. Good? Everything good? So I guess we just basically do the same- CAMERA OPERATOR: The ??? was getting under the ??? MATTHEW: I think we're good. Up to you guys. GARY: Yeah, No I think, no, we forgot to talk about price. How much is the- I could always add that in to the beginning or end. MATTHEW: Sure. GARY: How much is that? MATTHEW: StuffIt Deluxe full retail price is $79.99, upgrades are $29.99 and we actually do any version to any version. So if you've been using StuffIt Deluxe one we'll sell you the upgrade to Deluxe twelve for the same $29.99 price. GARY: Excellent and you still have StuffIt Expander so when you send a file to somebody they don't have to have StuffIt, they can easily decompress it and everything. MATTHEW: Yeah absolutely we have StuffIt Expander available for Mac, Windows, and Linux so all the major platforms are covered. We even have StuffIt available for Windows Mobile edition now so it's an increasingly wide range of platforms. GARY: Excellent. Well thank you very much. MATTHEW: You're welcome. GARY: So you can find out more about StuffIt at stuffit.com StuffIt Deluxe is a great full featured program and if you're a developer of any kind or somebody who works with, say, photos or large files you're probably going to want to get it. If you're not you might just want to get StuffIt Expander anyway, it's a free program that allows you to decompress anything that's been compressed with StuffIt. So check those out. Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.Related Subjects: Mac Software (89 videos) Related Video Tutorials: MacMost Office Tour ― New Way I Serve the Video At the MacMost Site
