Stuffit is evil. Stop using it.

(In general, not you specifically... though if you're guilty, you might want to think about learning how to make a dmg...) Urg. Look, people , even Apple, who supported Aladdin for decades, has dropped them. They're a waste of code. That's what tarballs and disk images are for. So stop using sits.

That is all.

For example, when I need to email 5 Quark files that are 2.5MB each, I usually stuff them in one folder for one attachment that sends quickly. Is that something you can do with a tarball or dmg? I'm not on top of the latest things anymore, & this is the first I've heard of these. Is a disk image something you can turn back into a workable file?

Also, politicat, why do you call Stuffit evil? I've been getting occasional requests to resend a file unstuffed b/c the recipient gets an error message opening the stuffit file. Your answer might clear up my small mystery...

Compressed disk image is the standard for mac now, and tgz is the *NIX standard. Stuffit is a proprietary form (one reason it is evil; the others are not) and Aladdin (stuffit's makers) really push for people to buy a utility that is no longer useful on a Mac (since Apple no longer bundles it and uses industry standards). Stuffit was always a little buggy (the in-joke was that Stuffit was a permanent beta test and we were all unpaid) and usually unpredictable; it liked to stick files in random, non-intuitive places where they would be lost and taking up hard drive space until the next format and reinstall. It also would sometimes fail to open a file for no readily apparent reason at all -- the file would open fine on machines A, B, and C, but fail to open on D and become hopelessly corrupted on S. Thus, your issue.

My issues with Stuffit are entirely related to the marketing around it. Apple licensed the software for years with every machine, ensuring that the company would survive; now that Apple has abandoned them because they can't meet Apple's quality standards, they've gotten shrill and pushy about getting people to buy their software. I don't mind nagware, but they are Mother-in-Law class nagware.

Here's the blurb from Mac Help on disk images: You can use Disk Utility to create a disk image of a single device, folder, or volume. You can use the disk image to transfer files from one computer to another, or burn the image on a CD or DVD and use it to restore the contents of another disk. To learn more about disk images, open Disk Utility, in the /Applications/Utilities folder, and choose Help > Disk Utility Help. (You need Disk Utility open. You might want to try it.)

Having had to endure "Quirk" Xpress all these years, and their incredible arrogance, I guess Stuffit's attitude went right by me, LOL. And I don't have to compress files that often. I'll miss the ease of the little Dropstuff icon, but having to resend something sure negates that convenience. Thanks again for the explanation.

... as the process to create a compressed .DMG takes a while and they are not cross-platform (as mentioned by others). The built-in .ZIP capability in OS X is great for that: right-click or control-click a set of files or a folder and select Create an Archive. Now, it doesn't do as good a job of compressing the files as dedicated software, but it's quick and people/systems are more comfortable with handling .ZIPs.

Regarding the problems you have seen with people unable to unstuff a .SIT, there was a version incompatibility with .SIT files created by Version 9 (I think) when using older unstuffers.

I concur with the OP, Stuffit is no longer useful and can even be a pain in the bum.

I stopped installing the full version of Stuffit last year. Stuffit Expander is free and is all I need for the rare .sit I come across.

Why is Stuffit evil?

Basically comes down to bugginess and marketing gigalo-ing, with a lot of fuck off customer service thrown in.

I've written a few shareware and freeware programs. One day, I started getting a MOUNTAIN of email from new users that none of my programs would run after downloading them (which was odd, since they'd previously been fine). Many other shareware and independent software authors experienced the same thing with their own software distributions.

Turns out, Stuffit Expander 8.0, in a lame attempt to be 'secure' on OSX, removed the executable bit from all files it unstuffed. This meant that if you stuffed an application, it would not run when you unstuffed it with Expander 8.0.

Then along came Stuffit Expander 8.1 (which was the last version actually bundled on OSX, IIRC), which 'fixed' this problem by making EVERY file executable when you unstuffed it. Yikes.

At that point, I kicked Stuffit to the curb and used only DMG disk images for distributing applications. The biggest disadvantage with DMG files (other than being Mac-only) is that many webservers don't know what 'dmg' files are, and tend to omit sending the proper MIME type that causes the file to be downloaded. Therefore, you end up with the contents of the DMG file displayed in your browser window rather than downloaded to your hard drive (unless you do the control-click 'Save Link as' thing). Zipping the DMG prevents this, even though it doesn't really make the file any smaller.

The only other problem with DMG-based distributions is that an amazing number of users seem to be just baffled by the concept of DMG files. One root of this problem is that a DMG disk image is sort of a metaphor for a virtual floppy disk. Thing is, Macs haven't handled floppy disks for many, many years...it's an unfamiliar metaphor for a new user.

Now that zip file handling is built into the Finder, and seem to handle permissions and resource forks properly, I'll probably use ZIP for anything I distribute in the future.