![]() ![]() ![]() Compact Pro's stub could also expand files that had been split into parts, a rare feature at the time.Īt the time of its introduction, Compact Pro offered, by far, the fastest and best compression on the Mac. Many considered even this to be too large to bother with, and there were a number of small third-party utilities to strip the stub off from an existing archive. In an era of 14400 bit/s modems, this was a worthwhile savings. Although this was becoming common in archivers at the time, its particular implementation was notable because the extractor "stub" code was quite small at about 13 kB (compared to StuffIt at 38 kB). Ĭompact Pro also included the ability to produce self-extracting archives. An odd, but oft-used, feature was the ability to include images and notes that would display when the archive was opened, using the same basic mechanism as TeachText. Compact Pro also featured an easy-to-use system for splitting files into parts to fit on floppy disks, a feature that most archivers implemented in an external program, if at all. Some of the more notable features included the ability to extract everything from an archive by double-clicking on it in the Finder with the ⌥ Option key held down, and automatically recognizing and converting BinHex formatted files back into native format without a separate step. Unlike most systems, Compact Pro used a non-modal Mac-like UI that was widely lauded in the press. Like most archiver systems, Compact Pro's primary purpose was to package up and compress files for transmission, then extract them again on the other side of the link. It maintained a niche among loyal users and as a preparation tool for Cyclos's "Smaller Installer" delivery package (which was notably used by Ambrosia Software), but disappeared from the market by the late 1990s.Ĭompact Pro also served as the inspiration for ZipIt, a PKZip-compatible archiver that was expressly designed to look and work like Compact Pro. Compact Pro never really regained its momentum after the release of StuffIt Expander. StuffIt 3.0 fought back with an even more powerful compression algorithm, a shareware version called StuffIt Lite with most of the same features, and the freeware StuffIt Expander which could decompress StuffIt archives and Compact Pro archives. It quickly drove StuffIt from the leadership position and became very popular on BBS systems. Compact Pro sported a clean interface and a variety of new features which quickly made it a favorite among the digerati. When it was introduced in the early 1990s, Compact Pro (originally known as "Compactor") competed against StuffIt, which had been suffering from neglect after its original developer moved on to other projects. A PC version was also available, ExtractorPC. ![]() It was a major competitor to StuffIt in the early 1990s, producing smaller archives in less time, able to create self-extracting archives without the use of an external program, as well as being distributed via shareware which greatly helped its popularity. Compact Pro is a software data compression utility for archiving and compressing files on the Apple Macintosh platform. ![]()
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