🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr8.173232.28176@cs.dal.ca> franklin@ug.cs.dal.ca (Steve Franklin) writes:
 >    Just how many formats would you ideally like to see on your Mac? I
 > would like to see just ONE. I do not place my head in the sand as you
 > suggest. I seek productivity from my mac, and do not enjoy
 > shuffling various compressors just to keep up with the pace of the net. 
 > Clearly I have better things to spend my time on... 
Yup.  But...  There are things like user interface etc. involved, so you
will have multiple compressors.  Also compression technology gets better,
so newer methods will get better compression and you must not discard that.
To wit, a sample I have:

Archivers:
archive		size	packing	time	unpacking time
pit		613504	14.15		 9.00		PackIt
sit		446080	 4.30		 7.00		StuffIt 1.5.1
cpt		317696	 7.30		 3.30		Compact Pro
zma		305408	15.00		 3.15		Zoom

Would you have wanted to stay with PackIt?  (Zoom is an archiver in testing
that will come out one of these days, fairly zoo compatible.  And I am not
the writer.)

 > An algorithm is not an application - it's an algorithm. Do you understand
 > the difference? I am wondering if the compression scheme of Compact Pro
 > is available to the general public, so that it can be used by various
 > applications such as Downline and the likes... I'd still be
 > interested in knowing this... 
Look at macunpack, available from quite a few sites, written by me.  While
it does *not* document the way Compact Pro compresses files, it *does*
document the way to decompress the stuff (and of course those DiskDoubler
archives that use Compact Pro's compression scheme).  The US patent office
is a bit unclear about whether compression methods can be patented,
decompression is again a different thing.
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland
dik@cwi.nl