BetterZip 3 is a useful Mac OS X archiving tool

By Aaron Lee

MacItBetter’s BetterZip 3 is a handy Mac OS X solution for archiving. One of the coolest features is Direct Mode, which speeds up working with large archives by making archive preparation and recompression obsolete.

The archive password manager helps you work with encrypted archives by collecting a list of archive passwords in your OS X keychain. These can be used automatically whenever you open  encrypted archives. BetterZip 3 adds a password generator which suggests strong passwords whenever you need them.

When you open a file in an archive with the View command and edit it with an external editor, BetterZip will detect the changes and give you the option to update the archive.

Presets can store all the settings that can be applied to an archive, from the destination folder and archive format, to passwords and even a script to execute when the operation completed. After that you can use and reuse the presets with one click instead of choosing all the settings over and over again.

BetterZip’s Favorites sidebar can collect all the archives on your disks in one place with fast filtering to find the right archive when you need it.

The BetterZip Quick Look Generator has now been integrated into the application. The Quick Look generator has always been and remains free to use for everyone, but there is one neat new feature that requires a BetterZip license: you can now click a file in the Quick Look panel, at which point command is handed over to BetterZip, which extracts and displays the clicked file.

BetterZip opens, extracts, and even creates AES-256 encrypted zip archives which are compatible with a wide variety of other archivers on all operating systems for secure data exchange, commercial and private alike. Furthermore, BetterZip can extract and create zip files larger than 2 GB as well as archives with these formats: tar, xz, gzip, bzip2, rar, xar, and 7-zip. More than 30 archive formats can be viewed and extracted, including various zip based Java archives (JAR files.) 

As of version 3, support was added for winmail.dat files, Apple Disk Images (DMG), and ePub files. Another new addition to BetterZip 3 was the extensive AppleScript support that lets you build workflows using BetterZip’s compression and extraction functions.

BetterZip 3 requires Mac OS X 10.9 or later. A trial version can be downloaded from MacItBetter online and is fully functional for 30 days. A single user license costs $19.95; discounted upgrades are available for $9.99.

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