Aladdin StuffIt
Stuffit the Best Compression Software for Macintosh
Aladdin StuffIt is an application that compresses files. Stuffit became popular in the mid-1990s because of the need to store large data on floppy disks and CDs.
Stuffit has changed hands over the years, and is now owned by Smith Micro.
I purchased the application in the 1990s, but never felt the need to update it. Once I was storing data onto CDs and DVDs I didn't encounter any max storage issues.
Classic description
Here's the description of Stuffit from the Educorp Catalog from 1990:
Technology Got the Better of the Application
Over the past few years the application had lost its effectiveness. Thanks to cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Drive:
- It's easier to store large documents - no longer do users have to worry about the limited space of disks, CDs or DVDs.
- Sharing files are super easy, simply upload a file to DropBox right click and get a shareable link to send in an email or in Slack.
- Cloud services allow users to encrypt files and offer monitoring services, something that Stuffit didn't provide.
- Storage has gotten cheaper. You can get a good quality 6TB USB drive for about $120. Apple Cloud goes for about $2.99 a month for 200 GB (which is about 3 DVDs)
Still Around
You can still buy Stuffit from SmithMicro for $19.95. The cool feature is the new StuffIt Destinations Toolbar, where you can drag and drop your files to various destinations.
Stuffit still is an important app because of encryption and storage space. For example, you can encrypt project folders that you don't want to end up in file search results from Spotlight or on shared space in Google Drive or Dropbox. Since Spotlight won't index the files,
Long Waiting Time
One of my all-time favorite screenshots:
That comes to 84,308,617 days or 2,309.82 Centuries. The Mar19_2517.jpg file should definitely be worth the wait.