OWENOJO  This is a shocking, sloppy piece of junk.

As many others here have said, it is useless. It cant even correctly open its own file format! Back in olden times, stuffit expander and its related formats, sit, bin , hqx and the dreaded sea thingie, were the standard mac archive formats. Now that many files are zipped, os x deals with these no problem, this thing is only needed to do one thing: open its one native format: a format you only encounter when a) someone made the mistake of encoding a file with this monstrosity, and b) to open old archives/ obsolete software you downloaded. IT CANT EVEN DO THIS RIGHT. version 12, 11, all cant extract a .sit properly without showing zero files, or missing files. How can Smith Micro/Alume/Aladdin (ive lost track!) market this evil, vile bastard offspring off years gone by anymore?

Get the free "the unarchiver". it works.  (Version 12.0.1)

C.BUTTON  Absolutely horrendous piece of software. Firstly the small-time developers behind it make you jump through far too many hoops to get a download for what is after all free software, then it's been so poorly coded that it's useless for the purpose it was designed for.

Macs have been using dual processors for some time now, yet this app which could *really* benefit from being multi-threaded still only uses one. Nearly every other decompressions app out there is multi-threaded and sees huge performance benefits, but this doesn't and as a result takes forever to compress/decompress large files. Not that it'll take the millions of hours the poorly coded estimate will give you (if you even get one, on multi file archives it rushes to 100% after one file then stays there for ever....), but it's just plain slow.

Back in the days of OS 7/8/9 this app was a must. With the advent of the built-in zip compression of OS X this is a vestige best left to the past. Yes, it creates files a few percent smaller than a zip, but then it takes forever for the person you send files to to find the decompresser and install it, assuming they even know where to look. For compressions stick with the Finder's .zip, and for decompressions use The Unarchiver. Both are free and much, much better than this legacy, proprietary lump of slow, buggy bloatware. Sorry Allume, you used to be cool but now you just suck.  (Version 11.0.2)

NIBBLING HELL GOAT  This is a truly dreadful piece of software that would have been dead and forgotten by now were it not for the proprietary compression scheme.

Stuffit got a foot in the door in the Classic Mac era, when cross-platform interoperability was less of a concern. These days I can only imagine the people that distribute files in .sit format are those who paid for Stuffit in good faith and would rather not feel like they'd wasted money. And so for the minority of developers who aren't using .dmgs or standard zip files, most users have the expander installed.

None of this would be a problem if the expander actually worked. Rather, the typical behaviour is that a crudely designed progress window pops up, informs the user that the operation will take several million hours to complete (if only I were exaggerating), then closes, leaving behind a directory which should contain the archived files, but doesn't.

And I've heard the "it's Tiger" argument, but Tiger is almost two years old now, and the fundamentals of file creation were not changed so drastically with 10.4 as to cause this kind of behaviour. It's bad programming, period.

With the news of free unarchivers that will handle Stuffit archives with a better degree of reliability than the official tool, perhaps we can lay this to rest finally, and keep it as one of those fond Yesteryear memories - along with System 7, CD caddies and the Happy Mac.  (Version 11.0.2)

CARL B.  Betterzip does a far better job for a smaller price and it is only a few months old. I mailed the developer once with a problem and got an answer in two hours, the bug fix was available after 3 days. Try that with Allume!  (Version 11.0)