What is Now Compress?

Sometimes being late to the party pays off, as it has for Now Compress. The program saves hard disk space by compressing files transparently or on demand and by creating archives. Now Compress includes the best features from the market leaders, including Fifth Generation’s AutoDoubler and DiskDoubler, and Aladdin’s StuffIt SpaceSaver, plus some unique features.

Installing Now Compress gives you a new menu in the Finder and a control panel for settings. All operations are handled from the menu, including compression and decompression, archiving and de-archiving, and creating self-extracting archives. You can also mark files or folders to be excluded from compression. Now Compress comes with three small applications — Archive Now, Compress Now, and Expand Now — that allow you to compress or expand items under System 7 by dragging and dropping them onto icons in the Finder. Expand Now is freeware that you can give to anyone who needs to expand files and archives created with Now Compress.

The program compresses files in memory, then verifies the compressed copy before replacing the uncompressed version. While AutoDoubler changes the icons of compressed files. Now Compress does not; the only way to tell if a file has been compressed with Now Compress is to view the file in the Inspector window.

Inspector is a feature unique to Now Compress that lists all the files and folders on your disk, along with their status. It tells you the uncompressed and compressed sizes for files and folders, and the size percentage saved by compression. You access Inspector from the Now' Compress menu, and you can control all of Now Compress’s compression and archiving features through a button bar at the top of the Inspector window.

Now Compress compacts files using two methods — Faster and Smaller. As you might expect. Faster mode is a bit quicker, but it doesn’t crunch files quite as tightly as Smaller mode. In most cases, it makes more sense to use Faster, as Smaller gives only small advantages in size. For example, a 215K uncompressed Excel file was squashed to 99K using Faster and to 86K using Slower.

Macworld Lab tested Now Compress’s compression speed and efficiency against AutoDoubler and StuffIt SpaceSaver, using 24 files from 7 different applications. Now Compress crunched most files a few percentage points tighter than did the competition but was a little slower at opening compressed applications and documents, usually by a few seconds. The extent of Now Compress’s extra compression, while measurable, wasn’t very large; for example, on our database test file, AutoDoubler compressed the file to 54 percent of its original size, while Now Compress crunched the file to 48 percent. All of the compression products showed significant slowdowns in launching compressed programs and files over their uncompressed counterparts, but comparisons of compression products showed little practical difference in speed. The spread between the fastest and slowest products in most of our tests was about ten seconds. I found that switching to Now Compress from AutoDoubler did not perceptibly slow my Centris 650 or PowerBook 140.

The Settings control panel allows you to set the volumes that will receive idletime compression, the amount of time the system will wait before compressing, and the amount of time a file must remain unmodified before it’s compressed. You can set compression to occur only between certain times of the day (or at system shutdown), and exclude items from compression by label, location, type, or creator. By default, the System Folder and its contents are not compressed. You can also set several preferences for archiving, and pick user-defined hot keys for most Now Compress functions.

The Convert function decompresses files previously compressed in AutoDoubler, DiskDoubler, Compact Pro, StuffIt 1.5.1, and StuffIt SpaceSaver and converts them to the Now Compress format. Now Compress cannot read StuffIt Deluxe or StuffIt Lite files, so you need to decompress these files with the freeware StuffIt Expander.

Now Compress is a good product. At press time, Now Software was finishing up a free maintenance release diat fixes minor bugs and improves compatibility with some applications, mostly disk utilities. As a late entry into the crowded compression market. Now Compress holds its own; it is easy to use, complete, and it compresses as well as or better than other options.

Negrino, Tom. (December 1993). Now Compress 1.0. Macworld. (pgs. 59-60).

Download Now Compress for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II