StuffIt enters the cloud

Raymond Lau, a high school student from New York City, wrote a program for Macintosh computers back in 1987. It was called StuffIt, and it made big things smaller. StuffIt was useful for making files fit for telecommunications. In 1987 there were few broadband connections, and most people used dial-up modems to connect to AOL, Compuserve, Delphi and other online services. In 1987, the Internet tubes were still being welded together.

Other compression methods existed in 1987. There was Tar for the UNIX geeks, and ZIP for the Microsoft geeks. Lau’s program filled the bill for the Mac geeks. And, behind the scenes were Lempel, Ziv and Welch, the trio who invented the lossless compression method bearing their initials – LZW.

Over the years, Raymond Lau’s program became the Aladdin Software company, and the product remained extraordinarily useful. Eventually Apple bundled the application with the Macintosh operating system (which likely made Raymond Lau a wealthy high school student). It became the most common method for compressing and decompressing files for storage and transfer on Macintosh computers; I used it for all the files on my web site for years, though I have gradually removed compression from those files as telecommunications speeds have improved.

StuffIt Expander, which could unstuff files compressed by the application, was available for free, making it possible for anyone who did not own StuffIt to use, and eventually StuffIt (the company) made a Windows-compatible version so that StuffIt files could work between platforms.

And, StuffIt has stayed with us over the years, making it all the way into Mac OSX. But Apple replaced the StuffIt bundle with their own ZIP-compatible compressor, which is part of the operating system. The ZIP files are a function of BSD UNIX, on which the Mac operating system is based, and they work well.

Eventually Smith Micro bought the Aladdin company, and Smith has been keeping pace with developments on both the Mac and Windows platforms over the years. Their product will both compress, and decompress common ZIP, Tar, and StuffIt archives, and it does it gracefully and without difficulty.

The most recent version of StuffIt Deluxe uses a brilliantly-devised compression-decompression method that the company calls StuffIt-X, which does an on-the-fly analysis of compression opportunities, and then compresses files using a variety of methods, some of which are either more efficient, or more compact than the normal compressors found in ZIP and others. StuffIt-X can compress a JPEG file more than JPEG does, but with no additional loss. It ZIPs tighter than ZIP – when it can – and across the board it makes smaller archives than any of the stock compressors alone.

The new StuffIt Deluxe provides a cloud storage environment where you or your colleagues can store and download compressed files.
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Last week I was introduced to the new StuffIt Deluxe, which includes a tool that is similar to several cloud computing services that have been popular in recent years. But, StuffIt makes the process a bit easier to use, a bit faster, and with a bit of interface panache that is admirable.

With a new menu bar the company calls the Magic Menu, you can select a file or a folder, and compress-and-mail the selection to a storage archive in the cloud. Files up to 5MB are e-mailed using your default e-mail application; larger files are sent to a server (somewhere), and then they can be downloaded from the cloud by the recipient (or by you) at any time.

This is similar to YouSendIt, a service of which I am quite fond. YouSendIt is free for files up to 100MB, and a for-pay service for larger files. YouSendIt also offers several versions of their for-pay service for those who need an upload space that is branded for their own purposes, or for those who need confirmation of delivery or return receipts for files sent.

Back to StuffIt: When you purchase or upgrade to the latest version of StuffIt software, you get a year’s subscription to their storage cloud, and you can post files with a total volume up to 2GB on their server to be downloaded by anyone you designate. Larger files, or more files can be accommodated at a higher price.

Delivery receipt (by virtue of an download indicator) is included in the service, and there is no limit to the number of files, folders or “invitations” you issue to your colleagues to download files.

I tried it last Wednesday, and I like it. It’s fast enough (determined by your broadband upload speed) and secure (all files are password-protected if you choose), and access is limited to those who are invited (access is also password-protected).

For a printing or publishing enterprise, this service would be nice because it will provide proof-of-delivery, security, and safety. If a prepress house were to send out an invitation to view a proof, for example, all of the recipients could be notified at once of the availability of the proof, and it only needs to be uploaded once.

I have used many FTP sites over the years; they have a bad habit of being un-secure. And, occasionally I have seen other customers’ files waiting in queues that I have accessed. This has given me chills of fear, knowing that my files are also available to them while they are waiting in the same queue.

With the new StuffIt Deluxe and its included cloud service, you can also upload files for your own purposes – you don’t need to send anything to anyone. You can treat it as a 2GB far-offline storage cloud from which you can access your own files from any computer, anywhere, at any time.

And, next year, when your subscription to the StuffIt service expires, you can upgrade to the next version of the software for $29.99, and it includes the next year of storage services. That’s $2.50 per month for both the software and the storage service.

Files stored on the cloud server are never deleted while your service is active (other firms delete uploaded files after a week), so you don’t have to remove the files from the server in any hurry. I will send an invitation to download a test file to any of you readers if you ask. Just send me a note at brian@thelawlers.com, with “StuffIt” in the subject line, and you can try it as a recipient.

I will be reporting on this new product more in the coming days as I gain more experience with it. My initial reaction is that StuffIt has done it right, again.

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