ZipMagic 98

                     Reviewed by Sue

We all have to work with zipped files from time to time. I use
them a lot because I keep all my old orders zipped on disk but
regularly have to refer back to them when customers reorder. I
find the zip format both a blessing and a curse. It's very handy
because I can get a lot more files onto a backup disk by zipping
them (Publisher files squash down exceptionally well) but the
drawback is that in order to work with them, I have to go through
the palaver of unzipping them ...

No longer; ZipMagic's main use to me is that it makes zip files
look like folders (with the extension ZIP) so that you can
manipulate their contents as if they were in an ordinary folder.
This is a godsend for me, because I can now load my DTP files, for
instance, straight into Publisher from their zipped state. Saving
them back into a zipped folder automatically zips them again. All
the compressing and decompressing is done on the fly and is
virtually invisible to the user. I've occasionally noticed a
slight delay when working with very large (eg 20 meg uncompressed)
files. Of course, zipping with ZipMagic is a simple as creating a
zip folder and dragging files into it. ZipMagic just makes life so
much easier - and I think it's brilliant!

I haven't had any problems with any of my programs reading a
zipped file or any corruption of the files through them being
zipped.  I've only found two slight drawbacks. The first is that
you can't attach a zipped file to an email if ZipMagic is enabled
because it sees it as a pseudo folder and you can't attach
folders. The second is that the backup program that comes with my
Zip drive falls over if ZipMagic is enabled ... I haven't worked
out why but I had a very frustrating evening trying to do a backup
before I realized that ZipMagic was the problem. Well, I can live
with both of those niggles for the general convenience of ZipMagic
and the benefits it brings. When I need to, I can either disable
ZipMagic completely with a click of the mouse when I do my weekly
backup, or just temporarily show folders as files to send an
attached zip file.

ZipMagic can cope with file extensions other than ZIP such as ARJ
and LZH. There are various plug-ins which can be used to help
with email attachments, downloads and so forth. It even has its
own management utility, ZipTools, which can replace Explorer but I
haven't used it yet.

I ordered my copy over the Net from Mijenix's UK agent for œ35.28
inclusive. A shareware version can be downloaded from the Net and
updates are regularly and freely available.









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