The Unarchiver - Answers the call for all your unarchiving needs

Freeware | Universal | OS X 10.3.9

While most long time Mac users are familiar with the .sit archive format and with the venerable StuffIt Expander, The Unarchiver, from Dag Ågren, fills nearly the same role.

I have always found StuffIt Expander to be quirky. Even now it sometimes crashes on my MacBook Pro C2D. The Unarchiver, on the other hand, is rock solid. And it supports a plethora of archive formats.

I keep this little app handy in my Dock and have it set to decompress all file formats.

I still keep StuffIt Expander installed -- The Unarchiver doesn't handle that pesky .sitx format.

The Unarchiver v1.6

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for "BOMArchiveHelper.app", the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.

It is very simple to use and install - simply copy it into your Applications folder or whereever you prefer, and then set archive filetypes to open using it. This can either be done the usual way, or by double-clicking the icon to show The Unarchiver's preferences.

Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more or less obscure formats. Support for so many formats is achieved by using the libxad unarchiving library.