I have been using StuffIt since Version 5.

Yes, I know OSX has it's built-in ZIP compression, and Tiger brings with it true resource-fork preservation with TARballs.

So, why StuffIt?

Because hands-down, StuffItX provides the best level of compression and can singlehandedly open the widest array of archives and archive formats.

Yes, 9.0 pissed me off (and I had some corrupted archives as a result) so I'm going to be a little leery for the next couple of weeks with this .0 release. Burn me once... and all... But, bottom line I worked a little bit with the guy at Allume/ Alladin who was the project manager for StuffIt and we exchanged a few emails, and things ended up getting sorted out in the end.

Besides, $30 to upgrade for StuffIt Deluxe (from 9.0, then 8.0, and so on and so on) really is reasonable. Hell, WinZip is at least $30 and it doesn't have anywhere near the features that StuffIt does.

The people here bashing StuffIt probably think they don't need anything more than TAR + either bzip2 or gzip compression, and for some people I'd totally agree.

But...

OSX isn't Linux. and Linux ain't OSX.

If you think an application will save you time, and make you more productive, and the price is reasonable to you, then you should buy it, plain and simple.

For me, the icing on the cake is the installer-like-maker and finally self-extracting archives on OSX.

Ignore the trolls. Sometimes I wish VersionTracker would enact something similar to Slashdot's comment rating system so trolls and their comments could be marked as "flaimbait," to which they are.