One of the first things that people notice is missing from Rhapsody (even before the installer in 5.0 and 5.1) is that archives don't have their own app for extracting the contents. With such an advanced GUI, it would be nice if we didn't have to make a trip to the terminal to unpack every download... or to pack every upload for that matter.

Fortunately that doesn't have to be a problem. On every installation of Rhapsody (and OPENSTEP/NEXTSTEP for that matter) that I do, I install OpenUp before anything else. Why? It only took the first time I had installed NEXTSTEP 3.3 and a ton of additional apps to figure out that I never wanted to have to type that much during a setup again.

OpenUp work nicely in the background. Double click on an archived file that OpenUp recognizes and it starts unpacking it. When it is finished it'll display the contents in a Workspace Manager window. And when you go to shut it down, it'll clean up after itself.

What more could you want? How about being able to pack things up (in either .tgz, .zip or .paz formats) within the Workspace Manager via the Services menu.

Stone Design has an app that works very much the same way. Pack Up and Go provides a window (nice for visual feedback) when packing things as well as a document well for dragging the final packed item to any place you need it (it automatically place a copy next to the original though). The interface looks very much like PStill.

And like OpenUp, Pack Up and Go works from the Services menu too. But it provides archiving the the standard .tar.gz format.

Though they have many over lapping features, they are different enough that I like having both on my systems.

You can find them for Rhapsody here:








And for those who want them for Mac OS X, you can find the latest versions here:






Stone Design's Create(tm)
2004-05-31 02:24:24 -0600