JulianSchrader.de

Freeware that made my day: The Unarchiver

Since our finals are done, I’m currently working on our “Abizeitung” — a journal featuring articles about everyone of the 79 people which leave the Wirsberg-Gymnasium this year. Each one of these articles is written by a group of friends, additionally there are many pictures and for example compilations of bloomers we collected over the years.

My duty is to put everything together — so many people send me different kinds of material. Mostly Word documents and JPEGs, few also send OpenOffice documents or other picture formats such as PNG. Then there are those who send both articles and pictures — often compressed into ZIP-archives containing both.

But I also got a file with the extension “.exe”. A Windows executable. I’m working on a MacBook Pro running OS X Leopard. What can I do to use the provided data without tricking the guy who sent it into re-sending it in another format?

The old way

I boot up my copy of Windows XP in Parallels Desktop by double-clicking the *.exe file. The VM (virtual machine) makes my Mac slow as hell as it’s eating all resources available. Working with other applications is rendered impossible, everything lags. There are two tweets that perfectly describe what I felt in a moment like that recently:

FU Windows XP Virtual Machine. Parallels once again puts my Mac into slow-motion mode. Why do people send me *.exe archives instead of ZIPs?

With this message, I’d like to declare officially: Parallels Desktop is a piece of crap. Makes my Mac slow as hell & crashes while updating.

After Windows XP finally booted up successfully and I closed all of those small notification windows that tell you you didn’t use certain items on your desktop and Windows would like to clean it up for you, I could finally double-click my *.exe file a second time. A small window pops up, asking me whether I want to Save or Execute the file. I choose Execute.

Another application window opens, it’s asking for the path it should uncompress the contents of the archive to. I choose Desktop and click OK. The application finally does it’s job and I can copy the files I’ve been meaning to get over to the Finder. And use them to proceed in my Mac environment — after I have shut down that virtual machine which is slowing down everything, but you already heard me ranting about that.

The new way

Since *.exe-archives are mapped to be opened with The Unarchiver now, double-clicking that file I got results in a window asking me to choose the codec I’d like to use. I do that, hit OK and it’s done. There are the files I need to proceed in InDesign and Photoshop.

Conclusion — How did this work?

All you need to do is download The Unarchiver and copy it to your applications folder — then double-click the application icon and set the archive file types which you’d like to map to open using The Unarchiver in the future.

Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more or less obscure formats.

…for example self-extracting WinRAR archives with .exe extension. If only everything could be as easy as this.

Download and install The Unarchiver now.

Thank you to Hagen Overdick a.k.a. @sixtus42 for this great recommendation!